A lamplighter is a person employed to light and maintain candle or, later, gas street lights. Very few exist today as most gas street lighting has long been replaced by electric lamps.
A lamplighter is a person employed to light and maintain candle or, later, gas street lights. Very few exist today as most gas street lighting has long been replaced by electric lamps.
Lights were lit each evening, generally by means of a wick on a long pole. At dawn, the lamplighter would return to put them out using a small hook on the same pole. Early street lights were generally candles, oil, and similar consumable liquid or solid lighting sources with wicks.
Another lamplighter duty was to carry a ladder and renew the candles, oil, or gas mantles.
In some communities, lamplighters served in a role akin to a town watchman; in others, it may have been seen as little more than a sinecure.
In the 19th century, gas lights became the dominant form of street lighting. Early gaslights required lamplighters, but eventually systems were developed which allowed the lights to operate automatically.
Today a lamplighter is an extremely rare job. In Brest as a tourist attraction a lamplighter has been employed since 2009 to light up the kerosene lamps in the shopping street every day. [1]
A small team of lamplighters still operate in London, England where gas lights have been preserved by English Heritage. [2] [3]
In the European Union, there are only two cities where lamplighters are still on duty: Zagreb in Croatia [4] and Wroclaw in Poland. [5]
In Waikiki, Hawaii, lamplighters in traditional Hawaiian costumes run along the shore and light gas torches in the evening.
Frank Serpico, an NYPD whistleblower, prefers to use the term "lamp-lighter" to describe the whistleblower's role as a watchman. [6]
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , a spy novel written by John le Carré, refers to Lamplighters as a section of British Intelligence that provided surveillance and couriers. [7]
Lamplighter's Serenade is a song written by Hoagy Carmichael. It was recorded by Frank Sinatra during his first session as a solo artist, on 19 January 1942. Bing Crosby also recorded a version of the song just days later.
The Old Lamp-Lighter is another song; its music was written by Nat Simon, the lyrics by Charles Tobias. The song was published in 1946.
Jack the Lamplighter is a character in the film Mary Poppins Returns .
"Fear Lasta Lampaí" ("lamp-lighting man") is a famous Irish-language poem by Máirtín Ó Direáin. [8] [9] [10]
In the late-19th and 20th centuries, most cities with gas streetlights replaced them with new electric streetlights. For example, Baltimore, the first US city to install gas streetlights, removed nearly all of them in 1957. A gas lamp is located at N. Holliday Street and E. Baltimore Street as a monument to the first gas lamp in America, erected at that location. [11]
However, gas lighting of streets has not disappeared completely from some cities, and the few municipalities that retained gas lighting now find that it provides a pleasing nostalgic effect. Gas lighting is also seeing a resurgence in the luxury home market for those in search of historical authenticity.
The largest gas lighting network in the world is that of Berlin. With about 37,000 lamps (2014), [12] it holds more than half of all working gas street lamps in the world. In central London around 1500 gas lamps still operate, lighting the Royal Parks, the exterior of Buckingham Palace and almost the entire Covent Garden area.[ citation needed ] The Park Estate in Nottingham retains much of its original character, including the original gas lighting network.
In the United States, more than 2800 gas lights in Boston operate in the historic districts of Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Bay Village, Charlestown, and parts of other neighborhoods. In Cincinnati, Ohio, more than 1100 gas lights operate in areas that have been named historic districts. Gas lights also operate in parts of the famed French Quarter and outside historic homes throughout the city in New Orleans.
South Orange, New Jersey, has adopted the gaslight as the symbol of the town, and uses them on nearly all streets. Several other towns in New Jersey also retain gas lighting: Glen Ridge, Palmyra, Riverton, and some parts of Orange, Cape May, and Cherry Hill. The village of Riverside, Illinois, still uses its original gas street lights that are an original feature of the Frederick Law Olmsted planned community. Manhattan Beach, California, has a gas lamp section in which all the sidewalks are lit by public gas lamps. Disneyland has authentic 19th century gas lamps from Baltimore along the "Main Street, U.S.A." section of the theme park.
Many gas utility companies will still quote a fixed periodic rate for a customer-maintained gas lamp, and some homeowners still use such devices. However, the high cost of natural gas lighting [13] at least partly explains why a large number of older gas lamps have been converted to electricity. Solar-rechargeable battery-powered gas light controllers can be easily retrofitted into existing gas lamps to keep the lights off during daylight hours and cut energy consumption and green-house gas carbon emissions by 50%.
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Media related to Lamplighters at Wikimedia Commons
Stage lighting is the craft of lighting as it applies to the production of theater, dance, opera, and other performance arts. Several different types of stage lighting instruments are used in this discipline. In addition to basic lighting, modern stage lighting can also include special effects, such as lasers and fog machines. People who work on stage lighting are commonly referred to as lighting technicians or lighting designers.
An arc lamp or arc light is a lamp that produces light by an electric arc.
A lantern is an often portable source of lighting, typically featuring a protective enclosure for the light source – historically usually a candle, a wick in oil, or a Thermoluminescent mesh, and often a battery-powered light in modern times – to make it easier to carry and hang up, and make it more reliable outdoors or in drafty interiors. Lanterns may also be used for signaling, as torches, or as general light-sources outdoors.
A Yablochkov candle is a type of electric carbon arc lamp, invented in 1876 by the Russian electrical engineer Pavel Yablochkov.
A street light, light pole, lamp pole, lamppost, street lamp, light standard, or lamp standard is a raised source of light on the edge of a road or path. Similar lights may be found on a railway platform. When urban electric power distribution became ubiquitous in developed countries in the 20th century, lights for urban streets followed, or sometimes led.
Gas lighting is the production of artificial light from combustion of a fuel gas such as hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, propane, butane, acetylene, ethylene, coal gas or natural gas. The light is produced either directly by the flame, generally by using special mixes of illuminating gas to increase brightness, or indirectly with other components such as the gas mantle or the limelight, with the gas primarily functioning as a heat source for the incandescence of the gas mantle or lime.
Máirtín Ó Direáin was an Irish poet from the Aran Islands Gaeltacht. Along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Ó Direáin was, in the words of Louis de Paor, "one of a trinity of poets who revolutionised Irish language poetry in the 1940s and 50s." According to a 1984 lecture by Desmond Egan, "Ó Direáin's genius stands revealed - to the extent that we must look abroad for poets with whom his achievement might best be compared; to Spain and Antonio Machado's sweet intensity; to Russia and Akhmatova; to Germany and the bittersweet music of Heinrich Heine."
The history of street lighting in the United States is closely linked to the urbanization of America. Artificial illumination has stimulated commercial activity at night, and has been tied to the country's economic development, including major innovations in transportation, particularly the growth in automobile use. In the two and a half centuries before LED lighting emerged as the new "gold standard", cities and towns across America relied on oil, coal gas, carbon arc, incandescent, and high-intensity gas discharge lamps for street lighting.
A ceramic metal-halide lamp (CMH), also generically known as a ceramic discharge metal-halide (CDM) lamp, is a type of metal-halide lamp that is 10–20% more efficient than the traditional quartz metal halide and produces a superior color rendition.
A light fixture, light fitting, or luminaire is an electrical device containing an electric lamp that provides illumination. All light fixtures have a fixture body and one or more lamps. The lamps may be in sockets for easy replacement—or, in the case of some LED fixtures, hard-wired in place.
The Cincinnati Street Gas Lamps are a historic district in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. Composed of more than 1,100 street lamps scattered throughout the city, the district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
In the United Kingdom, lighting-up time is a legally-enforced period from half an hour after sunset to half an hour before sunrise, during which all motor vehicles on unlit public roads must use their headlights.
An LED street light or road light is an integrated light-emitting diode (LED) light fixture that is used for street lighting.
The Lamplighter is a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson contained within his 1885 collection A Child's Garden of Verses.
The Bartlett street lamp was an economical type of lighting first patented and manufactured by J. W. Bartlett at 569 Broadway in Manhattan in New York City, in 1872. Bartlett claimed his street lamps cost less than a quarter of the $25 The New York Times had reported a competitor claimed they cost. The Times responded that the New York City Parks Department said that they actually paid more than that for each lamp, including the post and frame, that they used in parks, streets, and elsewhere. The city of Troy, New York used the lamps beginning in 1872 to replace older models when they wore out.
Solar street lights are raised light sources which are powered by solar panels generally mounted on the lighting structure or integrated into the pole itself. The solar panels charge a rechargeable battery, which powers a fluorescent or LED lamp during the night.
A lamplighter was an employee of a town who lit street lights.
Intelligent street lighting refers to public street lighting that adapts to movement by pedestrians, cyclists and cars in a smart city. Also called adaptive street lighting, it brightens when sensing activity and dims while not. This is different from traditional stationary illumination, and that which dims on a timer.
The Electro-Dynamic Light Company of New York was a lighting and electrical distribution company organized in 1878. The company held the patents for the first practical incandescent electric lamp and electrical distribution system of incandescent electric lighting. They also held a patent for an electric meter to measure the amount of electricity used. The inventions were those of Albon Man and William E. Sawyer. They gave the patent rights to the company, which they had formed with a group of businessmen. It was the first company in the world formally established to provided electric lighting and was the first company organized specifically to manufacture and sell incandescent electric light bulbs.
Early street lights in New Zealand were first installed in major cities in the 1860s with Christchurch recording having 152 gas lamps throughout the city. With the shift to electric lights cities moved away from gas lamps and on to the incandescent lamps with the towns of Wellington (1889) and Reefton becoming the first cities in the southern hemisphere to have electric street lights. Other towns soon followed suit with the town of Brightwater adding five and Richmond adding ten street lights in 1911. During the mid 20th century a move towards fluorescent lamps was taken up. Pressing into the 21st century New Zealand likemuch of the industrialized world has been expanding the installation of LED lights, and have seen large savings. In modern times communities in New Zealand have turned their street lights off for multiple reasons including to save energy and to help protect local wildlife in particular the Westland petrel as well as reduce light pollution.