Friday Night Lights

NOTE: This episode is a rebroadcast. There may be minor differences between the episode and the transcript you see below.

BRIAN: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh, here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hello.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf is with us.

PETER: Yeah, hey.

BRIAN: We’re talking today about the changing ways Americans have understood time in the course of their daily routines. Up until a little more than 100 years ago, the most important marker of time for most people was the rising and setting of the Sun.

PETER: And then, artificial light entered the scene. Now, people had been experimenting with electricity going all the way back to 1800. But it wasn’t until the final decades of the 19th century that electric light became commercially viable. Meg Cramer has the story of what the advent of light bulbs meant for one small town in Indiana.

MEG CRAMER: In 1880, T.P. Keater and Thad Butler took a trip to Cleveland. They were the editors of the Wabash Plain Dealer, the local paper in Wabash, Indiana.

They had heard about a man in Cleveland experimenting with electric lighting. And Keater and Butler had an idea. If they could bring just a few of these electric lights to Wabash, they could light up the whole town. And if they could pull it off, Wabash would be the first town in the world that could say it was entirely illuminated by electricity.

When they got to Cleveland, they met Charles Brush. Brush had installed 12 electric arc lamps in Cleveland’s Monumental Park as a sort of testing ground. The lamps were certainly a sight, floating above the park on posts 20 feet tall.

At the top of each post, there was an open glass bulb the size of a cantaloupe. Two long rods fed into it, one from the top, one from the bottom, nearly touching end to end.

When lit, a spark inside the bulb jumped from one rod to the next, tracing a bright electric arc. As the lamp heated up, the tips of the rods glowed hotter and hotter, giving off a strange violet white light, so bright it was painful to look at. It was hundreds of times brighter than the gas lamps people were used to. Someone said they looked like miniature moons, held captive in glass globes.

Keater and Butler were convinced. And they struck a deal with Brush to bring the lights to Wabash.

The plan was to put four arc lamps on the dome of the Wabash courthouse. The lamps would cast light half a mile in all directions, illuminating the whole town. For Charles Brush, Wabash was a chance to prove that his arc lamps were more than just an experiment. If a small farming town in Indiana could light up the night, it could only be a matter of time before bigger cities started lining up to do the same. And for Wabash, well, this would make the town famous.

But some people in Wabash did have their doubts, not just about the costs or utility of the lights, but about the dubious virtues of an electrified night. One resident worried that late night raccoon hunting would become so popular it would drive up the cost of hunting dogs. Others were concerned about how the light might affect crop yields and livestock.

BRIAN: The Plain Dealer says the electric light will virtually turn night into day. And as chickens never sleep during daylight, it’s only a matter of time when every fowl within the limits of Wabash will die for lack of sleep.

MEG CRAMER: And if all that sounds a little crazy, you’ve got to imagine just how dark night could be in 1880. This was back when New Yorkers could see the Milky Way from downtown Manhattan, when starlight cast a shadow, when cities turned off their gas lamps during a full moon because the moonlight was enough.

They waited in the darkness, crowded in by thousands of people whose faces they couldn’t see, eyes straining, fixed on the black shape of the courthouse, anticipating what it would all look like under a bright electric light. And then, it happened. Suddenly from the towering dome of the court burst a flood of light.

This is the account from the Wabash Plain Dealer. A flood of light, which under ordinary circumstances would have caused a shout of rejoicing from the thousands, no shout however or token of joy disturbed the deep silence.

People stood, overwhelmed with awe, it said, as if in the presence of the supernatural. Men fell on their knees, groans were uttered at the sight, and many were dumb with amazement. They contemplated the new wonder in science, as lightning brought down from the heavens.

The next day, headlines from Michigan to Chicago read things like, Wabash enjoys the distinction of being the only city in the world entirely lighted by electricity. People were wild about the idea of electric lighting. Soon, cities like Detroit and Minneapolis installed their own electric moons, huge clusters of arc lamps, suspended from iron posts 200 feet tall. One lamp, some claimed, was worth eight police officers.

By next year, Charles Brush had sold 6,000 arc plants nationwide. And while worries about sleep-deprived chickens and price-inflated coon hounds now felt overblown, there were other consequences to lighting the night, consequences nobody seemed to predict.

Before electric light, darkness defined the edges of the day. When the Sun went down, the workday was over. It was time to head home. But now, factory owners could just hit a switch and extend the day’s work. With the lighting of Wabash, industrial America opened its newest frontier, nighttime. Electric lights had pushed back the darkness, blurring the line between night and day.

BRIAN: Meg Cramer is a radio producer in New York.