Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light [Hardcover]

Jane Brox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 2010

Brilliant, reminiscent of Lewis Hyde's The Gift in its reach and of Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time in its haunting evocation of human lives, offers a sweeping view of a surprisingly revealing aspect of human history--from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future.

Brox plumbs the class implications of light--who had it, who didn't--through the many centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She convincingly portrays the hell-bent pursuit of whale oil as the first time the human desire for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later, gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure, which changed the ways we live and sleep and the world's ecosystems.

Edison's "tiny strip of paper that a breath would blow away" produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox's informative and hair-raising portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us.

Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and--only a few years before it becomes illegal to sell most incandescent light bulbs in the United States--timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: In Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, Jane Brox illuminates the fascinating and forgotten history of man-made light, tracing its development through centuries of sputtering, smoking candles, to the gradual refinement of gas and, finally, electric light. Brox captures the sense of wonder that permeated the Chicago World's Fair as electric light lit up the "White City," and shows how quickly we became reliant on electric light, recounting the trepidation and anxiety that accompanied the mandatory blackouts of World War II and the power outages that have plagued New York City's power grid since the 1960s. Brox also addresses the unexpected consequences of light pollution, detailing the struggles of astronomers who are no longer able to see stars, and migrating birds that confusedly circle lit buildings at night until they die from exhaustion. Brilliant is an eloquent account of how a luxury so quickly became a necessity, and permanently changed human history. --Lynette Mong

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Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Jane Brox, Author of Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

Dear Amazon Readers,

So much of life as we know it--our long evening hours, our flexible working days, our feelings of safety at night--depends upon cheap, abundant light made possible by the incandescent bulb. Now that new government energy efficiency standards will make filament light bulbs illegal by 2014--and for the first time our new means of illumination may not be as satisfactory as the old--it's the perfect moment to look at the extraordinary story of how we came to inhabit our world built of light.

Just five hundred years ago almost everyone lived at the mercy of the dark. In a time before street lighting, travel at night was always perilous, and forbidden to all but a few. Most people were confined to their homes after sunset--authorities in some towns even locked citizens inside their houses for the night. Within their close quarters, many had no hope of more than a few hours of light in evening--meager, troublesome light cast by one or two stinking tallow candles or oil lamps.

Since then, each century of painstaking progress in illumination has had its own drama. The 18th century's need for more and more light spurred a world-wide hunt for whale oil, which proved to be so exhaustive it put the very survival of some whale species in peril, while the 19th century race to build a viable electric light involved the work of many scientists throughout Europe and America. In truth, Edison's bulb was not the isolated triumph it often seems to us now. His achievement was only possible after centuries of evolving understanding of electricity, and decades of experiments by dozens of scientists racing to fashion a workable incandescent light.

Edison's light assured cheap, abundant illumination for many, but not all. The democratic distribution of light in the United States depended upon the decades-long struggle by rural Americans to have the same access to electricity as those in the cities and suburbs. And controversies continue: as the demands for energy efficiency compete with our desires to have the light we want, we find ourselves in the midst of a new race for the perfect energy efficient light of the future. And as the grave consequences of light pollution become more and more evident we are faced with the question: How much light is too much?

When you read Brilliant you'll not only gain insight into the history of artificial light, you'll find that the surprising, complex story of our illumination is also the story of our evolving modern selves.

-Jane Brox

(Photo © Luc Demers)

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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A superb history of how the availability of ever more artificial light has changed our world over the centuries, from stone lamps in prehistoric caves to contemporary light-emitting diodes (LEDs). No simpleminded technological determinist, Brox (Here and Nowhere Else) appreciates how culture and technology have affected each other at every stage. She repeatedly reveals how humankind™s increasing ability to extend the hours of light available for work and for leisure has been critical to the evolution of societies almost everywhere. Her readings of, for example, prehistoric southern French caves, medieval and early modern villages, whaling and other ships, industrializing cities, Chicago™s White City of 1893, and wartime and peacetime blackouts are invariably fascinating and often original. In addition, she conveys technical information clearly and concisely. Brox™s concluding portions, about the unexpected negative effects of too much artificial light on observatories in southern California and elsewhere, are provocative and dismaying. With Brox™s beautiful prose, this book amply lives up to its title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547055277
• ISBN-13: 978-0547055275
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #552,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #84 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Light

More About the Author

JANE BROX is the author of Clearing Land, Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Here and Nowhere Else, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Maine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating But Not Brilliant, July 5, 2010

By 

David M. Sherman "literarygarden" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (Hardcover)

Close but not brilliant. Certainly, a good portion of the book is fascinating and illuminating. When Ms. Brox allows her voice to shine through, the book is swift paced and cogently written. But, too often, Ms. Brox included long quotations, and relied too heavily on others to tell her story. On too many occasions, I felt that I was reading a college paper with sentences such as "the author notes that" followed by a lengthy quotation. Ah, but for a good editor.... These lengthy quotes were distracting. But when Ms. Brox tells the story of the social history of light in her own words, the story shines bright and clear.

I understand that including photographic plates would make the book more expensive. But, I often found myself having to consult internet sources to see the kinds of devices that are described in the book. Perhaps, some drawings or photographic plates would have allowed the reader to see clearly these early contraptions that illuminated the homes of our ancestors. (I often wondered whether Ms. Brox actually viewed some of the instruments of illumination for herself, or was she relying on secondary sources to describe the device for her.) Perhaps, too, the author could have written about the nature, physics of light. For example, though there is much discussion of the AC versus DC current, there is hardly a sentence describing the difference. I understand this was not a book about the physics of light. But, for the laymen, it would have helped to understand the rudimentary nature of that thing that illuminates our world.

On the whole, this is an enjoyable read. The subject matter (tracing the use of artificial light from prehistoric times through the present) is quite fascinating. Putting aside some of the stylistic criticism, this is an excellent book. It is both enlightening and enjoyable.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Information interesting; writing not so great, August 25, 2010

By 

E. Jacobs - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (Hardcover)

This book is a topical history of artificial lighting from the early use of candles to current trends in electric lighting. It includes interesting information such as the roles and perceptions of early street lighting (will it encourage crime or deter it?) and the effect of artificial lighting on migration patterns in animals and sleep cycles in humans. I found the book to be a worthwhile read for this information alone.

The major problem in the book was the over-reliance on block quotes when the author could have easily paraphrased the material and referenced it. Instead, entire superfluous descriptions were cut-and-pasted into the text (though they were properly referenced). This led to major disruptions in flow, and I found myself skipping many of the quotes as they really weren't necessary to the overall story being told. I was always advised that any piece of writing should not be comprised of greater than 10-15% direct quotations. This book is a good example of why that is excellent advice.

Overall: 4 stars for information and 2 stars for writing. It's worth a read if you'd like a quick overview of lighting through history.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Erratic attempt to trace the history of artificial light, September 5, 2010

By 

Ursiform (Torrance, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light (Hardcover)

As the subtitle indicates, the stated goal of this book is to cover the evolution of artificial light, from the feeblest torch to modern lighting. And it more or less does so up through the kerosene lamp, although the focus is already shifting toward lighting in the US, and away from the general topic of artificial light. Once the book reaches the Edison electric bulb the story shifts to the electrification of the US. This is certainly related to the subject of artificial light, but not quite the same thing.

After meandering through a chapter on rural electrification, then one on early fluorescent lighting, and then one on wartime blackouts in Britain, the book oddly shifts to the discovery of the Lascaux caves, and their paleolithic art. While I could imagine ways to tie this into the supposed story line of the book, the author really doesn't do so. I guess she found the topic interesting, and so threw in a few pages on it.

She next goes on to the 1965 blackout of the east coast of the US, and then imagines the US electrical grid of the future. This leads in to newer lighting technology, and her grasp of the details seems to fade. She describes LEDs as being "composed of miniature plastic bulbs illuminated by the movement of electrons in semiconductor material." This is actually almost right: LEDs are semiconductor devices that are usually encased in plastic as a convenient package.

When she gets to light pollution she goes back in time to the great California observatories. But, in referring to the Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain, she repeatedly refers to the 200 inch mirror as a "lens". This might be excusable in some histories, but an author writing about light ought to know the difference between a mirror and a lens. She then goes on to light pollution and, while I agree with most of what she argues, I again have a problem when she mentions replacing "mercury vapor streetlights with more efficient sodium vapor lamps, which don't interfere with the spectra of astronomical objects." First, she fails to distinguish between low and high pressure sodium lamps. It is the low pressure lamps that astronomers promote, because they emit at two specific colors, which they can use filters to eliminate. Which is not really the same thing as not interfering with a spectrum. I'm left with the impression that she is writing about things she doesn't quite understand. (And she ignores the public resistance to low pressure sodium lamps because of their yellow/orange color.)

This is a rambling book that often strays from the promised topic, and sometimes goes beyond the author's understanding of what she is describing. I wanted to like this book, but in the end it just doesn't live up to its promise.