The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light. Paul Bogard

Balla, the moon has become a little biscuit wafer hanging on for dear life, overwhelmed by the electric streetlight. And that, in fact, was Balla’s purpose. “Let’s kill the Moonlight!” was the rallying cry from Balla’s fellow Italian futurist, Filippo Marinetti. These futurists believed in noise and speed and light—human light, modern light, electric light. What use could we now have of something so yesterday as the moon?

      “It’s lighting itself up,” Schauer says. On a canvas three times the size of The Starry Night, with a background of darkness painted sea blue-green and brown, the electric lamp radiates rose-mauve-green-yellow in upside-down Vs. The lamppost is a candy cane of those same colors, while concentric circles of the colorful Vs reverberate with resonant light. Here is an optimistic vision of what electricity would mean, not only a night brighter than what we’d known but one more beautiful as well. Indeed, were this what electric lighting had eventually come to be, Balla’s reverence would be absolutely understandable even in our day. But of course, as my host says, “New York is never dark enough to see this.”

      And so here, fifty meters apart, hang two paintings that span a bridge of time when night began to change from something few of us have ever known into the night we know so well we don’t even notice it anymore. Done in the southern French countryside at the end of the nineteenth century, Van Gogh’s is a painting of old night. Done in the city at the start of the twentieth century, Balla’s is a painting of night from now on. With time, electric lights like the one Balla portrayed would spread across western Europe and North America, perhaps inspiring the popularity of Van Gogh’s painting as they did: As we lost our view of our own starry night, our view of his became more and more fantastic—this old night he had known and loved and experienced by gaslight.

       8

       Tales from Two Cities

       The secrets are very simple. Blend light with the surroundings. Don’t annoy the birds, the insects, the neighbors or the astronomers. If City Hall gave me money to do whatever I want, I’d teach people about the beauty of light.

      —FRANçOIS JOUSSE (2010)

      Gas street lighting first took flame on Pall Mall in London in 1807, with the light hailed as “beautifully white and brilliant.” Within a decade more than forty thousand gas lamps lit over two hundred miles of London streets, a scene described by a visitor as “thousands of lamps, in long chains of fire.” When, by 1825, the British capital was the most populous city in the world, no other place on earth was as extensively lit, or as bright.

      Though “bright” depends on whom you ask. To the nineteenth-century eye—which until that time had never seen streets lit by more than candle lanterns or oil lamps—gaslight would have been unquestionably bright. But to our modern eye, gas lamps can seem questionably dim—you might wonder if they’re even working. This isn’t only perception—modern Londoners (as well as city dwellers all over the world, including 40 percent of Americans) live amid such a wash of electric light that their eyes never transition to scotopic, or night, vision—never move from relying on cone cells to rod. With gaslight, they did—the nineteenth-century eye saw gaslit nights with scotopic vision, and so what would seem to us incredibly dim seemed to a Londoner at the time the perfect artificial light, with “a brightness clear as summer’s noon, but undazzling and soft as moonlight,” one that created “a city of softness and mystery, with sudden pools of light fringed by blackness and silence.” London ranks now as one of the brightest cities in the world—a white-hot splat on the World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness. Nonetheless, I have come to the city to see if, even so, amid all that light, that “city of softness and mystery” remains.

      I have a hunch it might, as London is still home to more than sixteen hundred gas lamps, most in the famous parts of town north of the Thames such as Westminster, the Temple, and St. James’s Park. British Gas, which has direct responsibility for twelve hundred, employs a six-man gas lamp team made up of two gas engineers and four lamplighters, each of whom tends to four hundred lamps. Though they no longer need light each individual lamp, a task Robert Louis Stevenson described in 1881 as “speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the dusk,” the lamplighters make a circuit from lamp to lamp that usually runs about two weeks, cleaning the lamps, relighting pilot lights, winding the timers. Stevenson mourned the lamplighter’s impending fate from the imminent arrival of electric light, writing, “The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such a one; how he distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected it.” Greek myth or no, the modern lamplighter’s job is a popular one, with positions seldom changing hands.

      On a crisp December evening, I join two members of the British Gas team, Gary and Iain, at St. Stephen’s Tavern near Westminster Bridge, meeting amid the locals packed wall to wall, ties loosened and coats on their arms, before going out to see some of the best of the lights. About their affection for the lamps, both men are unabashed. “Once you get involved you fall in love with it,” Gary says. And Iain, who moved to London from Glasgow, Scotland, tells me, “When I came down here I’d never seen a gas lamp before. I was totally taken by the history, and I found myself walking along the streets looking at electric lights thinking, Bastards, why is that not gas?”

      London does seem to have an awkward relationship with its remaining lamps. While national heritage laws protect the lamps from being removed, apparently nothing in those laws protects them from being overwhelmed by electric light. On the edge of St. James’s Park I saw what seemed to epitomize the situation. There stood a Victorian lamp fixture with perfectly good and glowing gaslight. Immediately to its right, less than two feet away, stood a taller, newer lamppost with a glaring electric light of no design but far more light. While certainly this back-to-back placement of gas and electric isn’t uniform in London, rare is the street, park, or courtyard lit only by gaslight, and it’s easy—if you’re a fan of gaslight—to see this as an opportunity missed. As Iain says, “There’s no doubt that electricity is a better way to do it, but you also can’t deny the romance of gas lamps.”

      Both men consistently see evidence of the gas lamps’ enduring public appeal. “You’d be surprised how many people walk by the lamps and don’t bat an eye,” says Gary. “But as soon as we go out and put up a ladder on them, everybody stops and starts taking photographs.” Why do gas lamps appeal to us so? Part of it is simply that they are not as bright as electric lights—about as luminous as a 40-watt incandescent bulb. Part of it is that we like the Victorian fixtures; we like that style. Part of it is that gaslight’s lower temperature offers the red-orange color of an open flame, which we’re far more drawn to than bright white light. And finally, when you see a gas lamp on St. James Street in Covent Garden, or anywhere in London, you feel connected to the past—that nostalgia, that feeling of “so this is what it was like.” Brightness, design, color, history—gaslight creates a beauty not better than electric light, but different.

      One place to experience this truth best is around Westminster Abbey. The private courtyard behind the abbey known as Dean’s Yard is lit by gaslight, and, yes, it’s much darker than you might expect from a city square. In fact, it takes a few minutes for our eyes to adjust after walking from the pub past Parliament and the abbey. But as our eyes grow used to the darkness, the light becomes perfectly bright. As Gary says as we look around, “You can see what you need to see. It’s not daylight, but it’s a lovely effect.”

      The effect, though, is subtle. If your objective is to light a football stadium, for example, you won’t be happy with gaslight. When electricity first came to European streetlights, the public realized just how subtle the gaslight they’d grown used to was. You get the sense that some observers felt as though they’d been tricked. Said one Londoner, “Gas lighting had no effect whatsoever on the brightness of the street; it was not turned on at all for three evenings and nobody noticed the least difference.” Said another, “as soon as we look away from the broad thoroughfare into one of the side streets, where a miserable, dim gaslight is flickering, the eye-strain