Illuminating the streets, alleys, parks and suburbs of the American City: non-networked technologies, 1870-1920

ABSTRACT During the nineteenth century American cities transitioned from offering minimal services to providing services through networked infrastructures. Among these were street lights fueled largely by coal gas produced by manufactured gas plants and distributed by pipe line and later by electricity, both arc and incandescent. Because of fuel and construction costs, manufactured gas was expensive and uneven, and gas networks were confined to business sectors and affluent neighborhoods. To provide light to dark neighborhoods and suburbs, off-grid stand-alone technologies unconnected to a piped or wired network often supplied illumination. The most common of these were fueled by gasoline and naphtha, byproducts of petroleum distillation aiming primarily to produce kerosene. This pattern was present in many American cities and towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, the case of stand-alone gasoline and naphtha street lights presents an important variation to the advance of the networked city.