The sight reminds me of Ellen Meloy’s essay “The Flora and Fauna of Las Vegas” and its concluding image: “Out from nowhere,” Meloy explains as she stands outside the Mirage watching the casino’s volcano erupt, “a single, frantic female mallard duck, her underside lit to molten gold by the tongues of flame, tries desperately to land in the volcano’s moat … Unable to land in this perilous jungle of people, lights, and fire, the duck veers down the block toward Caesars Palace. With a sudden ffzzt and a shower of sparks barely distinguishable from the ambient neon, the duck incinerates in the web of transmission line slicing through a seventy-foot gap in the Strip high-rises.”
So bright and so recent—in evolutionary terms the Las Vegas we know today appeared in a sudden flash. The Luxor beam has only been on since 1993, several of the largest, brightest casinos have been built even since then, and the city’s longest living residents were born before the first casino signs were illuminated in the mid-1940s. In less than a human lifetime what was almost an entirely dark place grew to the brightest place in the world, its population skipping from eight thousand in 1940 to sixty thousand in 1960 to more than two million today. “Welcome to Las Vegas,” reads the famous sign, but only since 1959. Meloy’s mallard, the bats and birds caught in the Luxor’s beam? In terms of time to adapt, they’ve never had a chance.
As early as the mid-nineteenth century, some European cities were experimenting with electric light on their streets. As I walk past the Paris, Las Vegas, I think of an 1844 drawing showing a demonstration of arc lighting in the Place de la Concorde of Paris, France, cutting like a train’s headlight through an otherwise jungle-dark night, catching in its glare the Place’s fountains and a crowd in evening gowns and suits, some grasping umbrellas as protection against the light. Arc lighting was simply too bright for many uses, the first type of lighting that could truly be mentioned in the same sentence as the sun. (And it wasn’t too bright simply because people had never seen anything like it. The moment I see a small arc light blazing away at the electricity museum in Christchurch, England, my immediate wish is for an arc welding mask—this was light that clearly could destroy your eyes.) As a result, it wasn’t until 1870 that several European capitals installed arc lights on some main thoroughfares. While the intensity of these lights was so great they had to be placed on towers high above the streets, their arrival was met with fascination and pleasure by most (many cities in the United States barged ahead with their installation, for example). They were, it seemed, an answer to our prayers.
The idea had always been to banish darkness from night. As far back as the early eighteenth century, proposals had been made to illuminate the entire city of Paris using some kind of artificial light set high on a tower. The most famous of these was the Sun Tower proposed by Jules Bourdais for the 1889 Paris Exposition that would stand at the city’s center near Pont Neuf and cover all of Paris with arc lights. Unfortunately for Bourdais (and fortunately for the rest of the world), his proposal was turned down in favor of one by a certain Gustave Eiffel. But even Eiffel’s tower now has spotlights on the top, to the delight of some and the disgust of others.
Understanding how bright arc lights were, it makes sense how ready the world was for the incandescent light bulb. A report from the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris reads: “we normally imagine electric light to be a blindingly bright light, whose harshness hurts the eyes … Here, however, we have a light source that has somehow been civilized.” The change affected not only street lighting, of course. Arc lights had been entirely impractical for domestic houses, but as Jill Jonnes explains in Empires of Light, when incandescent bulbs arrived,
wealthy, cultivated women in floor-length, rustling dresses delighted in showing their friends how if you just turned a knob on the wall, the room’s clear incandescent bulbs began almost magically to glow, casting an even, clear light. Unlike candles, the electric light did not burn down or become smoky. Unlike gaslight, there was no slight odor, no eating up of a room’s oxygen, no wick to trim or smoked-up glass globes to be cleaned.
It was in order to supply domestic customers like these that Thomas Edison in 1882 opened his first power station in lower Manhattan. By 1920 in America, electric service reached 35 percent of urban and suburban homes, and by World War II more than 90 percent of Americans had electric light. Still, it wasn’t until FDR’s insistence on the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 that electric light began to reach many areas of the rural United States, and not until well into the 1950s could one reasonably say most Americans enjoyed the benefits of electricity. Since that time, we have simply turned that knob on the wall farther and farther to the right, spreading electric light from city to city, town to town, up onto mountaintops and down into hollers, across the plains and into the desert, from coast to coast.
I sometimes try to imagine living in a city before electricity. How quiet pre-electric nights would have been without cars or trucks or taxis, without any internal combustion engines at all. No radios, televisions, or computers. No cell phones, no headphones, nor anything to plug those headphones into if you had them. How deserted the city with most of the population locked inside their homes, the night left to fears of crime, sickness, and immorality, and best avoided if one could. Finally, and most strangely—the biggest difference from that time to ours—not one single, solitary electric light.
How dark it would have been—imagine leaning out your door and, on the darkest nights, not being able to see more than a few feet in any direction. Historian Peter Baldwin describes as “downright perilous” the streets in early American cities, with few paved and then those only with cobblestones. On nights of clouds and no moon, he writes, “travel was obstructed along the sidewalks and street edges by an obstacle course of encroachments: cellar doors, stoops, stacks of cordwood, rubbish heaps, posts for awnings, and piles of construction material … In 1830 a New York watchman running down a dark street toward the sound of a disturbance was killed when he collided blindly with a post.” What lights did exist were intended only as beacons or guides rather than to illuminate the night. The New York street lanterns burning whale oil were in 1761 merely “yellow specks engulfed by darkness,” and even more than a hundred years later its gas lamps were still “faint as a row of invalid glow-worms.”
In Brilliant, Jane Brox tells of how American farm families, after they first got electric light, would turn on all the lamps in their house and drive out a ways just to watch it glow. Who can blame them? To go from the stink and dark and danger of kerosene to the clean well-lighted place brought by electricity—at the speed of light, no less. I would back away to admire the view as well. But soon it will be the rare person in the Western world who hasn’t spent his or her entire life bathed in electric light, and no one will remember what night was like without it.
In the United States, our bright nights began with the first electric streetlight in Cleveland, April 29, 1879. But it was in New York City that the “possibilities of nighttime lighting first entered American consciousness,” writes John A. Jackle in City Lights: Illuminating the American Night. “Once adopted there, its acceptance was assured almost everywhere.” Thomas Edison returned to New York after a trip in 1891 to Europe proclaiming, “Paris impresses me favorably as the city of beautiful prospects, but not as a city of lights. New York is far more impressive at night.” Broadway was always the first, always led the way. It was the city’s first street to be fully lit at night, first with whale oil lamps, then gas (1827), then finally electricity (1880). In a drawing from City Lights of Madison Square in 1881, arc lights on a tall pole shed light on an otherwise dark city scene of strolling couples, a horse-drawn carriage, telegraph poles and wires, and—in this famously windy part of the city—a man in the foreground who seems about to be blown over by the light as he crosses the street, cane in hand. By the 1890s, Broadway from Twenty-third Street to Thirty-fourth Street was so brightly illuminated by electric billboards that people began calling it The Great White Way.