Tim Matson surveys an often overlooked aspect of independent living—firelight. In this completely revised and updated classic, Matson describes in lively detail all the elements of firelight—beginning with an explanation of the lighting system he developed from his Vermont home. • The romantic history and modern molding of candlepower • Traditional kerosene lamps • The versatile Aladdin • Liquid propane (LP) gas lights • Kerosene and gas pressure lanterns (the Coleman) • Incandescent mantle safety • The "Return of Firelight" from glass-fronted hearths and stoves In addition, Matson shows how to select, assemble, install, and safely maintain these non-electric sources of light. This guide will be indispensable for vacation homes, camps, boats, RVs, independent homesteads—and anywhere in a blackout.
Tim Matson surveys an often overlooked aspect of independent living—firelight. In this completely revised and updated classic, Matson describes in lively detail all the elements of firelight—beginning with an explanation of the lighting system he developed from his Vermont home. • The romantic history and modern molding of candlepower • Traditional kerosene lamps • The versatile Aladdin • Liquid propane (LP) gas lights • Kerosene and gas pressure lanterns (the Coleman) • Incandescent mantle safety • The "Return of Firelight" from glass-fronted hearths and stoves In addition, Matson shows how to select, assemble, install, and safely maintain these non-electric sources of light. This guide will be indispensable for vacation homes, camps, boats, RVs, independent homesteads—and anywhere in a blackout.
How electric light created new spaces that transformed the built environment and the perception of modern architecture. In this book, Sandy Isenstadt examines electric light as a form of architecture—as a new, uniquely modern kind of building material. Electric light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a streetscape; it brought with it new ways of perceiving and experiencing space itself. If modernity can be characterized by rapid, incessant change, and modernism as the creative response to such change, Isenstadt argues, then electricity—instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent—is modernity's medium. Isenstadt shows how the introduction of electric lighting at the end of the nineteenth century created new architectural spaces that altered and sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. He constructs an architectural history of these new spaces through five examples, ranging from the tangible miracle of the light switch to the immaterial and borderless gloom of the wartime blackout. He describes what it means when an ordinary person can play God by flipping a switch; when the roving cone of automobile headlights places driver and passenger at the vertex of a luminous cavity; when lighting in factories is seen to enhance productivity; when Times Square became an emblem of illuminated commercial speech; and when the absence of electric light in a blackout produced a new type of space. In this book, the first sustained examination of the spatial effects of electric lighting, Isenstadt reconceives modernism in architecture to account for the new perceptual conditions and visual habits that followed widespread electrification.
The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.
A sweeping history of the electric light revolution and the birth of modern America The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it and capturing the wonder Edison’s invention inspired. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility in which the greater forces of progress and change are made by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.
While certain ecological problems associated with artificial night lighting are widely known-for instance, the disorientation of sea turtle hatchlings by beachfront lighting-the vast range of influences on all types of animals and plants is only beginning to be recognized. From nest choice and breeding success of birds to behavioral and physiological changes in salamanders, many organisms are seriously affected by human alterations in natural patterns of light and dark. Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting is the first book to consider the environmental effects of the intentional illumination of the night. It brings together leading scientists from around the world to review the state of knowledge on the subject and to describe specific effects that have been observed across a full range of taxonomic groups, including mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, fishes, invertebrates, and plants. Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting provides a scientific basis to begin addressing the challenge of conserving the nighttime environment. It cogently demonstrates the vital importance of this until-now neglected topic and is an essential new work for conservation planners, researchers, and anyone concerned with human impacts on the natural world.
It takes any number of forms. Epigrams. Aphorisms. Fragments. Sayings. Dicta. Sententiae. Facetiae. Pearls of wisdom. Fractions of truth. Maxims. Definitions. Jottings. Miscellaneous musings. Meditations. Ricordi. Pensées. Ephemera. Miniatures. Sketches. Vignettes. Denkbilder. Capriccios. Tiny 'fires without flames' ... In returning to these genres, Matches goes back to the drawing board of modern critique. It sets out to rekindle short-form literary-philosophical reflection, with roots in the Antiquity of Heraclitus and Hippocrates, apogee in the French moralistes (La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Chamfort ...), and late splendour in German letters (Nietzsche, Kraus, Jünger ...). Moving from art and aesthetics to philosophies past and present, through natural and technological landscapes, beneath the constellations of politics, history and ethics, along the byways of contemporary literary culture--the slow reader with a little spare time will not fail to be struck. Here are pages to peruse and mistrust, texts to think with, a book to put down and ponder, to ponder and put down. A tome to keep handy, handle often, and strike repeatedly against the rough patches of the mind.
Hundreds of gas, electric, ceiling, and art glass fixtures, and wall and table lamps from the early 1900s are featured in this reprint of selections from the R. Williamson & Company Lamp Catalog. In addition to revising the prices to reflect today's market, Joanne & Francis Thomas have included several pages deleted from the original catalog in our first reprint. A special color section in the book features gas and electric glassware, electric bowls, stalactites, and balls, globes, and candelabra shades and holders.2000 values. REVIEW: This book shows the diversities in products and presentation of pieces by the Fostoria Company, until it closed the factory in Moundsville in 1986. The authors have presented this complex period as simply as possible, providing original company catalog pages and detailed photographs.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch tells the story of the development of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of a technology, Disenchanted Night reveals the ways that the technology of artificial illumination helped forge modern consciousness. In his strikingly illustrated and lively narrative, Schivelbusch discusses a range of subjects including the political symbolism of streetlamps, the rise of nightlife and the shopwindow, and the importance of the salon in bourgeois culture.
