cabinet -- blinded by the light

8/25/2014 CABINET // Blinded by the Light

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/21/archibald.php 1/7

ISSUE 21 ELECTRICITY SPRING 2006

Blinded by the LightSASHA ARCHIBALD

Few concepts are so intimately wed as that of knowledge and light. Yetamong the myriad experiences of light—"dawning awareness," "dimunderstanding," "seeing the light," etc.—there is one that seems to havelittle relationship to the province of philosophy: a kind of light that does notpermit clarity of thought, but is instead blinding, painful, or disorienting.Whereas the light of illumination might be described as "the letting appear"

that does not itself appear,1 this other kind of light is said to dazzle, or to letnothing appear, at least nothing besides itself. Those lacking insight areusually considered "in the dark," but dazzlement is often a betterdescription: the madman of Michel Foucault's Madness & Civilization, for

instance, is not deprived of light, but actually "drunk on a light."2 Similarlydo the cave dwellers of Plato's allegory suffer when coaxed out into the sun.Truth, it seems, is only revealed by a very controlled and precise amount ofillumination—too little of it, or too much, and light fails the task.

The Spatial distribution of incandescent light under verious lampshades, fromLouis Bell, The Art of Illumination, 1912

With the advent of electric light in the nineteenth century, the distinctionbetween illumination and dazzlement took on new life in the literal, physicalexperience of the general public. Electricity at the turn of the century wasnot a scaled-back version of electric light today, but rather just the opposite:Finally with the means to light each crack of every sidewalk and each cornerof every railway station, people did exactly that. According to one newspaper,the houses in St. Petersburg, Russia, were lit so as to see a fly on the wall,

even a fly 400 paces from the source of light,3 while another paper describedwith awe how "the trees and flowers are plainly visible in every detail of leaf,petal and twig ... the very stones of the gravel walk, the mosses on the wall

... are visible."4 Whereas most of daily life before electricity was conducted inthe shadows, electro-enthusiasts aimed to eradicate the shadow completely,to march into the twentieth century in a blaze of unadulterated light. Insome cases, the demand for brightness even outstripped the availability ofelectricity. According to Gösta M. Bergman's history of theater lighting, the"incipient light cult" that hit theaters in the 1880s, for instance, wasactually not directly attributable to electric light—only a few theaters werewired for it—but to its associative effects: electric light in a few theaters

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seems to have provoked brighter lights in all theaters.5 "It would seem that

[electricity's] mere existence makes an increase of light necessary," as one

reviewer wryly commented.6 Such bombastic enthusiasm for the new

technology created spaces that were dizzyingly bright—spaces where,

paradoxically, it was impossible to see anything besides the light itself.

To be fair, the brightness wasn't all due to overzealous installation. There

was little to choose from in the way of electric lights at the time, and few, if

any, devices capable of diminishing the light's intensity. The usual story of

electric light (at least in America) begins with Thomas Edison unveiling his

incandescent bulb at Menlo Park in 1879, but in fact, the incandescent was

Edison's attempt to improve on another form of electric illumination in

widespread use—the arc lamp. Invented in 1801 by Sir Humphry Davy, the

arc lamp created light (and a great amount of heat) via an electric charge

arcing between two rods of carbon. The first arcs required a source of power

independent to each and constant monitoring of the burning rods, but

following centralized power stations ("dynamos") and improved design, the

light came into common use. It was several times over the brightest artificial

illumination available: for comparison, a gas lamp measured between three

and eight candlepower (the standard for light measurement at the time), a

carbon incandescent between 300 and 500, and an arc lamp anywhere from

10,000 to 100,000. At the top of its range, the arc was about as bright as a

modern searchlight.

"A lamp for a nightmare!" was how Robert Louis Stevenson described the

sterile white light of the arc lamp, a light that completely lacked the warm

orange tones of gas or yellowish cast of candlelight. "Such a light as this," he

continued, "should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the

corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror."7 The arc was

indeed used in lunatic asylums, but also in factories (where it was

responsible for the first night shift), as well as exhibit halls, railway stations,

and libraries. The light of a department store, as described by Émile Zola in

his 1883 novel Ladies' Paradise, was a penetrating "white brightness of ablinding fixity": "There was nothing now," Zola's character states, "but this

blinding white light."8 Indeed, descriptions of electric light in this period as

brilliantly white are repeated ad infinitum, and epitomized in the terming ofChicago in 1893 "The Great White City," or New York's strip of early electric

signs "The Great White Way." In the form of street lighting, the light's

intensity created violent contrast between lit and unlit. The usual solution—

raising the light and doubling its strength—exponentially increased the total

amount of light, against which women were known to open their umbrellas.

There was surely a degree of pain suffered for such brilliance. It was

impossible to look directly at a nearby arc lamp;; even at long distances, the

light seared the eye. Stories of temporary vision loss were not uncommon,

and there seems to have been growing awareness in the phenomenon of

after-images as a warning sign of retinal fatigue.9 Writers complained that

schools were a "factory for bad eyes"10 and lighting specialists articulated

their professional goal as alleviating the pangs most people feel when

viewing buildings lit up at night.11 The arc lamp was not the only problem, as

the new carbon incandescents were also dangerously bright, especially when

used in the home. In one case of "retinal burn," a person sitting two feet

from an unshaded incandescent went blind after a few weeks of daily

exposure.

Louis Bell's The Art of Illumination, first published in 1902 and revised andexpanded a decade later, seems to have been the first publication to draw

attention to the situation. Argued with the pedantic tone of a man who feels



himself the sole voice of reason in a sea of stupidity, Bell insists that the

current application of electric light is lacking both wisdom and taste, to grave

consequences. The most important factor in electric illumination, he writes,

is the relative intensity of the light source, or its "intrinsic brilliance."12

Contrary to intuition and common practice, visibility does not endlessly

improve with lights of higher and higher intrinsic brilliance;; it gets worse.

Even the Alaskan Indians, Bell points out (illustrating with a small diagram),

have the sense to protect their eyes, and from light less severe than that of

an unshaded incandescent. In sum, one must always remember that "the

human eye is not merely a rather indifferent optical instrument, but a

physical organ."13

Bell found the aesthetic effects of excessive illumination as troublesome as

the physiological risks. He includes how-to instructions on lighting reception

halls versus cellars versus billiards rooms, drawings of "do and don't"

lampshades, and recommendations for paint colors that best counteract the

sterility of electric light. He was by no means the first to point out that too

much electric light reveals things better left hidden. Theater critics had long

complained that electricity undermined the illusionist effects of scenery,

props, and makeup, making everything look crude and garish while at the

same time destroying any perception of depth of field.14 In the drawing

rooms or parlors of the few who could afford electricity, the light made a

mockery of an atmospheric evening. Neither was it very flattering. Bell's

particular rant, though, signals the receptiveness of a larger audience to

such complaints—or a brief moment when electricity's success as an

illuminant was not so assured. Indeed, Bell does not hesitate to furnish

advice like, "a tallow candle, just where it ought to be, is better than a

misplaced lamp."15 Nor did the wonders of electricity dissuade him from hope

in capturing the firefly's phosphorescence.

Electric light did not waver in the balance for long. Just four years after the

first edition of The Art of Illumination, the Association of IlluminationEngineers convened their opening address, declaring that "our eyesight is

suffering permanent injury" and thus immediate action was necessary.16

Illumination engineering rapidly evolved as a professional field that by using

a combination of optic physiology, geometry, mechanics, and

entrepreneurship obviated the very concerns Bell articulated. Illumination

engineers were remarkably quick to understand and solve the particular

problems of electric light, and to provide the means by which electricity

moved from being a conspicuous technology to an ordinary one. Simply put,

illumination engineers made electric light useful. For their accomplishments,

they were heralded as "artists" and lighting a bona fide art form—rightly so,given the crudity of their precedent.



Display designed by Maxfield Parrish for GE, ca. 1925. Used in hardware stores

for customers to test their bulbs before purchasing.

New inventions combined with smart advertising to assure electricity's

success as an illuminant, a success best judged by the ubiquity of electric

light today. By 1915, the arc lamp was consigned to the lighting of

skyscrapers and to warfare, where it was finally put to good use in startling

the enemy. The National X-Ray Reflector Company made its first fortune in

the sale of light reflectors that promised to "Tire Eyes Less!" by reducing

electric glare. General Electric vastly expanded their line of fixtures

elaborately shaped as flower bouquets, vines, and buds in a successful effort

to soften the connotations of electric light and increase its appeal to female

consumers.17 For similar reasons, the company also renamed the

incandescent the "Mazda," based on the name of the Persian god of fire, and

hired Maxfield Parrish, the wildly popular artist and illustrator, to design print

advertisements and product merchandise, including a celebrated line of

calendars. In most cases, Parrish's GE ads do not appear to be related to

electricity at all, but depict Venetian lamplighters, pretty flamenco dancers,

or primitive man with his fire in the background and a naked nymph in the

foreground—but this was exactly the point. Tiffany lamps (and their

imitations), first produced in 1899 and the result of a nearly fifteen-year

collaboration between Louis Tiffany and Thomas Edison, proliferated, as a

means to diffuse and pleasantly color the harsh electric whiteness. And

finally, in 1915, the landmark invention in the history of electric light made

innocuous: concealed light bulbs. Taking the lampshade one drastic step

further, electric bulbs at the 1915 Panama-Pacific World's Exposition were

hidden under statues, embedded in sidewalks, camouflaged by bushes, or

tucked in architectural adornments.

Of course, not all electric light became mundane. New York City's GreatWhite Way, for instance, the panoply of moving electric signs on Broadway,



wouldn't reach its zenith for another two decades, while neon lights, light

shows, and nocturnal architecture—the idea of designing architecture toward

a building's nighttime rather than daytime appearance (e.g. Las Vegas)—

were still to come. The enthusiasm for making electric light spectacular,

however, was always matched by an equal enthusiasm, albeit much more

difficult to chronicle, for making electric light invisible. The difference

between these two modes of illumination crystallized and split paths in the

first two decades of the twentieth century, the former succeeding by loudly

declaring itself, and the latter, by obscuring its own artifice.

In 1929, the Prefect of the Seine ordered the removal of all electric signs in

France not directly adjacent to the businesses they advertised. French

citizens, wholly in support of the measure (as were Germans), haughtily

declared, "Paris is proud to be known as the City of Light, but she wants it to

be intellectual rather than electric."18 Electric light was now the thing that

crassly announced its own existence, and America was free to use it how it

pleased. The rest—the light that simply illuminated—was returned to

philosophy.

Maxfield Parrish, Prometheus, 1919. From a 1920 GE calendar.

1 Hans Blumenberg, "Light as a Metaphor for Truth," Modernity and the



Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1993), p. 31.

2 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age ofReason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 108.3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light inthe 19th Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press,1995), p. 118.

4 4The Sanitarian, 1878. Cited by Schivelbusch, p. 114.5 Gösta M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm: Almquist & WiksellInternational, 1977), p. 287.

6 E. Mascart, from J. Lefevre, L'Electricité au théatre (1884). Cited byBergman, p. 296.

7 Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Plea for Gas Lamps" (1917). Cited bySchivelbusch, p. 134.

8 Cited in Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things andTheir Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993), p. 161.

9 Staring at an arc lamp, as Schivelbusch notes, was very much like staring ata "small sun" (Schivelbusch, p. 118). After-images had in fact been studied as a

scientific phenomenon for some time. Three famous nineteenth-century

scientists, including Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, severely

damaged their eyes by staring at the sun in order to produce after-images. See

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in theNineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), p. 141.10 Cited in Louis Bell, The Art of Illumination (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1912),p. 344.

11 W. D'A. Ryan, "Illumination of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,"General Electric Review, Vol XVIII, no. 6 (June 1915), p. 580.12 Bell, p. 1113 Ibid., p. 214 Bergman, p. 294. See also Schivelbusch, p. 199.15 Bell, p. 30616 Schivelbusch, p. 180.17 Flower motifs were supposedly Mary Edison's idea, and the only knowninstance of the inventor's wife having any part in his business decisions. See

Charles Bazerman, The Languages of Edison's Light (Cambridge, Mass: MITPress, 1999).

18 Cited in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of aNew American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 343.

Sasha Archibald is an associate editor of Cabinet.

Cabinet is a non-profit organization supported by the Lambent Foundation, theOrphiflamme Foundation, the New York Council on the Arts, the NYC Departmentof Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy WarholFoundation for the Visual Arts, the Katchadourian Family Foundation, GoldmanSachs Gives, the Danielson Foundation, and many generous individuals. Pleaseconsider making a tax-deductible donation by visiting here.

cabinet -- blinded by the light

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