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Billboards went up all over, but especially along main streets in the rapidly developing residential neighbourhoods pressing out from countless nineteenth-century downtowns. The ones in Toronto were designed by E. L. Ruddy, an ad firm; often erected in front of vacant lots, the billboards promoted the latest home appliances: water heaters, fridges, stoves, devices that delivered on the heavily hyped promise of new technology in the service of middle-class domesticity.
Despite the economic depression of the 1930s, these marketing messages resonated with Toronto consumers and homeowners. Unlike the nightmarish visions of city life rendered in films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and in stark contrast to the receding frenzy of the Roaring Twenties, the ads posited a safe and comfortable urban future anchored by the nuclear family and enabled with labour-saving devices.
The advertiser behind these billboards, as well as a series of opulent showrooms, was Consumers’ Gas, a pillar of Toronto industry that traced its roots to a sprawling complex of gothic gasworks on the eastern edge of the downtown that dated back to the 1860s. Indeed, what all those appliances had in common was that they were gas-powered. Homeowners enticed to purchase them could hook up their dwellings to the expanding network of gas lines running under city streets and then pay a monthly fee to source their fuel from Consumers’.
Interestingly, when James Austin, a Northern Ireland–born financer, first invested in the fledgling gas company in 1859 and oversaw its rapid expansion, Consumers’ had an entirely different market in its sights: gas lighting, a technology that was sweeping rapidly through industrializing cities in Europe and North America, transforming the very experience of living in those cities. After all, gas lighting illuminated the public and commercial spaces of the night-time city in ways never before seen. According to historians of that period, gas lighting gave rise to the forms of nightlife (theatre, restaurants, cafés, clubs, etc.) that we have long taken for granted. Improved street lighting also helped police control crime.
Yet gas lighting as a transformative urban technology collided head-on with the emergence of a rival lighting technology powered by electricity that was produced in coal-fired generators and hydroelectric stations. In fact, the competition between gas and electricity companies raged fiercely for several decades in virtually every big city. In Toronto, Austin pushed to improve the reliability and quality of Consumers’ gas-producing network, then sought to consolidate the firm’s hold on the illumination business by attempting to expand into his rival’s turf – a move blocked by Toronto aldermen, who seemed to prefer electricity (Armstrong 2003).
By the 1920s, electric light was clearly winning the light wars, despite the efforts of the gas industry to retain its position as the dominant player. In many city regions, including San Francisco, the gas and electric utilities merged and morphed into sprawling energy monopolies like PG&E, but not in Toronto. In 1910, the Ontario government decreed that hydro-electric power should be considered a public good and removed from the private market. Consumers’ Gas, in turn, pivoted, staking its commercial future on appliances, industrial customers, and heating – a decision that paved the way for the emergence of Enbridge as one of North America’s gas and pipeline giants.
The story of the technology of urban light can be traced, oddly, to the invention of fireworks in China almost 2,000 years ago. These tiny explosives turned up in Europe in the 1200s, likely with the goods carried back by traders travelling the Spice Route. In the next few centuries, the popularity of fireworks displays, or ‘illuminations,’ spread from capital to capital, and finally to North America, employed for a wide range of celebrations and demonstrations of power by everyone from emperors to popes, mayors, political parties, and victorious armies.
These elaborate and entertaining pyrotechnical demonstrations served to illuminate grand buildings and public squares, drawing mass audiences to witness multicoloured rockets lighting up city streets normally sheathed in darkness after sunset. According to a 2018 history of urban lighting by David Nye, a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of Southern Denmark, 600,000 Parisians showed up to watch a display marking the marriage of Louis XV’s sister. Another, held on November 4, 1825, marked the completion of the Erie Canal, featuring fireworks and a spectacular light show from the roof of New York’s city hall.
During the 1860 U.S. presidential election, Republicans set off fireworks and held torchlight parades. ‘Every night was marked by … tumult, shouting, marching and counter-marching, the reverberation of explosives and the rush of rockets and Roman candles,’ said one observer quoted by Nye, a leading technology historian.
Between such festivities, of course, most people got their light from candles, fireplaces, or oil lamps. Some cities also had a few oil street lamps, but they cast little light, and certainly nothing like the ephemeral brilliance of grand fireworks displays. Those illuminations, in fact, whetted the public’s appetite for urban spaces that could be seen and enjoyed after sunset.
Which is not to say that city dwellers simply slept once darkness fell. As Nye points out, all sorts of things happened at night, from doctors’ visits to the collection of waste. People went to taverns to drink, cooks rose well before dawn to begin preparing meals, and watchmen, the predecessors of municipal police officers, patrolled streets. ‘Darkness partially leveled society and loosened social controls, and those who were subservient by day enjoyed greater freedom during the night,’ he writes. ‘Secret societies, protest groups, homosexuals, and persecuted religious sects commonly met under the cover of darkness’ (Nye 2018, 16).
The advent of gas lighting in the early decades of the nineteenth century drastically altered this picture, recasting the way city dwellers dealt with darkness. As with many technologies, the advent of gas lighting involved technical ingenuity and opportunistic investors, but mainly it emerged almost by accident, as the by-product of an entirely different process.
The rapid industrialization of the late eighteenth century was driven by the proliferation of steam engines fuelled by coal. In the 1770s, a young Scottish engineer named William Murdoch went to work for Boulton & Watt, the Birmingham-based manufacturing powerhouse that later produced the engines used to pump water and sewage in London. He realized that when coal was burned to heat water to create steam, it gave off a flammable gas and left a residue of coke. Murdoch figured out how to capture that waste gas and pipe it to a narrow nozzle, where it could be ignited, creating a continuous flame. Boulton & Watt’s managers reckoned they could sell this new technology to their industrial customers, the first being a textile mill in Manchester. As Murdoch recounted a few years later, ‘The peculiar softness and clearness of this light, with its almost invarying intensity, have brought it into great favour with the work people’ (Murdoch 1808). He added that gaslight was safer to use in the combustible atmosphere of a cotton plant because it didn’t throw off sparks the way candles did.
Boulton & Watt began building and selling the equipment for producing gas, mainly to its industrial customers. The assembly involved ovens, retorts, and other devices designed to purify the gas by removing tar, and gas containers to store the end product. The company soon faced a commercial rival, an upstart firm called the Gas Light and Coke Company (GLCC), which had been founded by an elbows-out German entrepreneur named Frederick Albert Winsor. He had seen early demonstrations of gaslight in Paris in 1802 and reckoned this new technology represented a huge opportunity. He moved to London, rounded up investors with deep pockets, and began to recruit customers, such as theatres, public buildings, and finally signed street-lighting contracts with local authorities.
In his 2011 account of the early days of the gaslight industry, Leslie Tomory observes that the inspiration for Winsor’s most important innovation came from the network of sub-surface mains constructed by London’s water companies. ‘The growing presence of water companies piping water under streets to homes … presented Winsor with a legal model, as well as one way to imagine the distribution of gas – via pipes running under the streets,’ he wrote. ‘Water supply and gas provision were treated by Parliament and public opinion during this period as any other sort of business venture, to be placed in private hands, with the assumption that competition would protect the public interest.’
During the 1810s and 1820s, Boulton & Watt and GLCC squared off in a very public war of words and intensive lobbying that would have seemed very familiar to anyone who has watched rival tech firms attack one another. The two companies traded accusations about safety issues – gasworks plants had a tendency to explode – while British parliamentarians debated whether the gaslighting business should be regulated. As Tomory explains, other upstarts joined the fray, some of them long shots and others offering potentially disruptive alternatives, like whale oil. In an attempt to refute damaging allegations about safety, GLCC hired chemists to review its processes and propose improvements. Winsor’s firm also agreed to a political compromise designed to ensure that GLCC would stay in its lane, i.e., limiting its commercial activities to laying down mains and selling gas, and not expanding into the business of manufacturing the equipment, which was Boulton & Watt’s turf.
Despite all the controversy, the technology itself was proving to be extremely popular – a bona fide solution to the problem of dimness. ‘The demand for gaslight, driven by its illuminating power, proved to be vast, with GLCC constantly receiving requests from shops, homes, and public buildings,’ Tomory notes, adding that the company often struggled to deal with leaks and other technical service problems relating to its rapid expansion.
Within a few decades, gaslighting had spread rapidly to cities across Europe, pushed forward by Winsor’s innovative approach to building a distribution network, as well as the growth of industrialization and rail. After all, the gas business, with its dependence on coal, could only expand to cities where coal could be shipped.
First movers like Winsor’s firm scaled rapidly, to borrow a phrase from twenty-first-century tech. ‘Gas Light and Coke Company’s success in solving the many problems it faced in constructing a large, urban gas network is demonstrated by its rapid growth,’ Tomory concludes. ‘In mid-1814, it had four paying customers and £180 in annual revenues … [B]y 1820, its 122 miles of mains were supplying gas to about 30,000 lamps and its revenues had reached £101,785.’ The steep revenue growth shows GLCC had tapped into a large and eager market.
The public’s appetite for gas lighting jumped to the U.S. and Canada. By 1853, New York’s two gas utilities had built 246 miles of gas mains that served businesses and residences, and 9,000 street lamps, according to Nye. Hundreds of other U.S. cities soon followed. The sheer momentum of the dispersion of this technology can be seen as a preview for how other types of networks – transit, telephone, cable TV, internet – would scale within urban settings.
The technology dramatically altered city life. Theatres shifted their performances from the afternoon to evenings. Streets seemed safer at night, and the bright new light also drew crowds outside in the evenings. Cafés opened to cater to this new activity. ‘The custom of taking a walk at the end of the day became more common, and the French invented the word flanêur to describe a fashionable person sauntering through the city streets,’ observes Nye.
Yet the spread of urban illumination proved to be socially illuminating as well. In Paris, the advent of this new evening leisure activity was enabled by Baron von Haussmann’s extensive reconstruction of the city – a process that involved levelling dense and crumbling slum districts and replacing them with wide boulevards lined with elegant gas lamps.
As the prominent American political theorist Marshall Berman pointed out in All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, his 1982 account of urbanism in the age of modernity, ‘[T]he boulevards, blasting great holes through the poorest neighbourhoods, enable the poor to walk through the holes and out of their ravaged neighbourhoods, to discover for the first time what the rest of their city and the rest of life is like. And as they see, they are seen: the vision, the epiphany, flows both ways. In the midst of the great spaces, under the bright lights, there is no way to look away. The glitter lights up the rubble, and illuminates the dark lives of the people at whose expense the bright lights shine’ (Berman 1988, 153).
The urban world teased out of the shadows by gas lighting, with its soft warm glow, did not survive the ethos of invention and capitalism that prevailed in the late nineteenth century. Just as file sharing and then streaming killed CDS over about two decades of sustained, albeit fitful, technological advancement, electric lighting completely vanquished gas within a generation. By the 1920s, when Consumers’ Gas was trying to sell gas-powered refrigerators to housewives, electricity was extending its dominance from lighting to communications and consumer goods.
The first electric light was invented at almost the same time as Winsor began marketing gas lighting in London. But ‘arc lights,’ which worked when a charge jumped between two electrodes encased in glass, produced a harsh white light. What’s more, the heat generated by the current caused the electrodes to burn out frequently. However, throughout the nineteenth century, German and English inventors steadily expanded the science and engineering of electricity, which in turn gave rise to practical applications, such as electric motors. In the 1870s, a growing number of cities began installing arc lighting in public spaces – typically spherical glass street lamps on poles well above the sidewalk, to spare pedestrians from staring directly at these intense light sources.
The effect, according to Nye, was transformative. ‘Where gaslight provided a narrow range of muted colours, the arc light replaced this sepia landscape with one where fabrics and flowers retained their daylight appearance,’ he observes. ‘Gaslights had made the city recognizable and navigable, but electricity made possible a wide range of nocturnal behaviour once only possible during the day’ (Nye 2018, 46).
As is well-known, the world of nineteenth-century electricity was fraught with technological schisms, and in particular between low-voltage direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The Croatianborn engineer/inventor Nikola Tesla had been working on street lighting in Paris and moved to New York in the 1880s, where he went to work for the U.S. super-inventor Thomas Edison. (Their clash over the dominance of AC or DC as the standard for electricity generation has become the stuff of legend.)
After an extensive process of trial and error at his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison in 1878 announced the invention of an alternative to the arc lamp: an incandescent bulb that produced light using a very fine filament stretched between two electrodes. Its glow was softer than that of an arc lamp, and it consumed less energy. Edison also realized that he had to build an integrated manufacturing and distribution network to support his invention – an engine-driven generator to produce the power, circuits to transmit it, and outlets for the bulbs themselves.
According to historian Thomas Hughes, who wrote extensively about the evolution of major American technological systems, Edison ‘announced his brainchild with fanfare in the New York Sun on October 20, 1878 … [H]e told the reporter of his plans for underground distribution in mains from centrally located generators in the great cities; predicted that his electric light would be brought into private homes and simply substituted for the gas burners at a lower cost; and confidently asserted that his central station would “light to all houses within a circle of half a mile.”’ As Hughes points out, Edison’s brash instinct to hype his scheme preceded his ability to actually build and integrate all the necessary elements (Hughes 1979, 126).
As proof of concept, he tested his incandescent lighting with a single industrial company – a New York City printing company – but then began laying the groundwork for a more extensive deployment based on the gaslight industry’s business model: a central source of power, distributed through an underground network to end users who would pay a fee. Edison tested the model in London, but his big play was the construction of the Pearl Street Station, which opened in lower Manhattan in 1882 – the world’s first electrical generating plant and the corporate ancestor of the energy giant Con Edison.
The four-storey structure, built on a pair of adjacent 25 by 100 foot lots, housed four huge boilers in the basement, which powered six twenty-seven-ton generators, dubbed dynamos, that were based on a design by Werner von Siemens, founder of the electrical engineering powerhouse (‘Detailed Biography’ 2016). The upper storeys held devices to monitor current and test lamps. About 80,000 feet of cables snaked out from the station through a network of underground conduits accessible through manholes. The choice of location, a few blocks from Wall Street, was not an accident: Edison wanted his station to be in close proximity to an area with a dense concentration of potential customers (‘Milestones: Pearl Street Station, 1882’). Among the first was the New York Times, which published glowing reviews of this new light source.
To whet the appetites of potentially obstructionist municipal officials, one of Edison’s well-connected collaborators invited New York’s mayor and several aldermen to visit Menlo Park for a demonstration. Edison led a late-afternoon tour of the labs and then summoned the guests to a darkened second-floor space. ‘Lights suddenly went on to disclose a lavish “spread” from famous Delmonicos,’ Hughes recounts. The shock-and-awe display allowed Edison to secure a franchise agreement with the city to bury cables beneath public streets.
However, as he points out, Edison wasn’t just an inventor and promotor; he paid very close attention to the underlying economics. He meticulously calculated the cost of electric light relative to gaslight, a process that meant working backwards from the most fine-grain elements of this technology, such as the cost of filaments and the physics of electrical current.
The gaslight industry, moreover, had a very firm grip on its market by the 1880s, with substantial investments in production and distribution infrastructure, as well as arrangements with municipalities to run the mains under city streets. ‘[G]as remained a formidable competitor, as domestic customers were accustomed to it, and the gas system was literally built into their architecture,’ Nye notes. ‘Over 1,000 miles of gas mains beneath New York’s streets supplied factories, theatres, office buildings, and homes as well as streetlights’ (Nye 2018, 52–53). In 1892, he adds, gas lamps outnumbered arc lamps by twenty-two to one.
A year later, the Chicago World’s Fair – a.k.a. the Columbian Exposition or the ‘White City’ – provided what could be described as an explosive marketing push for electric light. Throughout 1893, over 27 million people visited the fairgrounds, which featured elaborate domed buildings, esplanades, and waterways, extravagantly illuminated, inside and out, with electric light. ‘Beneath the fountains, spotlights fitted with colored filters permitted operators to create symphonies of color to the accompaniment of the band music,’ Nye writes. ‘The electrical engineers thought these fountains in the Court of Honor “taught the public the possibilities” electricity offered for inexpensive improvements to city parks’ (Nye 2018, 121). Similar demonstrations occurred in many other major cities on both sides of the Atlantic.
Over the course of the next two decades, Edison and several of his most trusted lieutenants, who brought engineering, managerial, and financial savvy to the enterprise, built the necessary foundations of what would become the standard architecture of electrical infrastructure – networks of massive generating stations, which fed high-voltage transmission lines that were linked to substations, local grids, and finally consumers. This process of commercialization pivoted on the development of numerous other technological and engineering innovations, such as the eventual transition to Nikola Tesla’s AC power, which proved to be far more manageable than the DC Edison had originally used.
Electrification took North America by storm. To put the speed of this evolution into a contemporary context, the two decades following the 1994 introduction of the first commercial browser, Netscape, encompassed the wholesale transformation of internet access from a network of generally static websites and analogue connectivity via a phone line to the advent of high-bandwidth fibre-optic cable, readily available wifi, and the full deployment of streaming video. They were comparably transformative.
Yet, as Nye explains, the transition from gas to electric light wasn’t a linear process, and required, among other things, the development of entirely new ways of financing energy. In cities like Chicago, several different lighting technologies were still in use prior to World War I, and incandescent bulbs had a relatively small market share – evidence, he says, that the changeover was influenced by factors beyond cost and superior technology. In this case, the present-day analogy is to electric vehicles, the consumer reluctance toward which has been a function of non-technological factors, e.g., availability of charging stations and ‘range anxiety.’
There is one other important point of comparison between the light revolution and contemporary technological systems, which has to do with spinoff applications made possible by additional capacity. As electric light gained traction and drove investment in electrical distribution infrastructure, new uses emerged, including one of the most far-reaching from an urban form perspective: electric transit in the form of streets, trolley buses, and subways.
Beginning in the 1890s, electric streetcars, initially operated by private firms, began transporting commuters in urban areas. Intercity rail was very much a nineteenth-century phenomenon that connected urban regions, opened up rural areas to settlers, and enabled industrial shipping. But electric streetcars expanded the geographic footprint of many cities, allowing new development on the urban edges and enabling the rise of the so-called ‘streetcar suburb.’ This pattern of moderately dense, pre-automobile development extended linearly along streetcar lines, as homes and small apartments clustered within walking distance of the commercial main streets that served as the spine of these transit networks. The effect was amplified with the advent of subways, which, in early adopter cities like London and Paris, used electric power to solve the problem of running rail service underground without the use of steam engines.
Just as the telecommunications industry’s multi-billion-dollar investments in broadband fibre-optic networks gave rise to waves of new data-intensive applications for computers and smart phones, the massive expansion of electrical generating and transmission infrastructure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century paved the way for city-altering technologies that had nothing to do with lighting.
Finally, the shift from gas to electricity triggered far-reaching political clashes over society’s relationship with this new and transformative form of energy. These battles were in stark evidence in Ontario, among other places. At the turn of the century, hard-driving capitalists like Henry Pellatt, the man who built the faux château Casa Loma, were determined to make huge bets on hydro-electric power generation. He, and many other entrepreneurs, reckoned that electricity’s future included much more than just lighting and streetcars.
Pellatt’s firm, the Electrical Development Company, secured permission to build a monumental generating station at Niagara Falls, with an eye to supplying burgeoning markets in southern Ontario and especially Toronto. The City of Toronto, however, also wanted to secure access to Niagara’s hydro power, but through a publicly owned utility, so the municipality wouldn’t be beholden to private energy interests. After several years of skirmishes between the city and the various provincial governments, Ontario established a public hydro commission and declared that electricity should be provided at cost to consumers.
In May of 1911, according to an account of the city’s power system, ‘Adam Beck, chairman of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, pushed a ceremonial button, marking the official inauguration of publicly-owned electricity distributed by the Toronto Hydro-Electric System. With that historic action, Beck launched what would become the largest municipal electricity distribution company in Canada’ (‘Turning on Toronto’ n.d.).
With its assortment of modern appliances and showrooms, Consumers’ Gas in the 1920s and 1930s gamely tried to buck the tidal momentum toward electricity, but with limited success. As CDS were to cassettes, or streaming services have been to appointment television, electricity was simply a better and more versatile technology – not just for lighting, but for a very broad range of other applications, many, though not all of which, were urban.