Customer Reviews

Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Your midnight fumbling for the bathroom switchplate has centuries of precedence, it turns out. Brox surveys the long history of humankind's attempts to defy darkness with technology, from fire, rush lights, caged fireflies, the phosphorescence of rotting fish, whale oil lamps, gasoliers, ending with electricity, which has proved so reliable we seem no longer able to function without it.

Her account is not without ambivalence. Whole chapters discuss how the abundance of artificial light deranges us and other living things, interfering with fundamental biological processes such as sleep and migration. She's disturbed also by how much artificial light removes us from diurnal and seasonal patterns, from even knowledge of the nonhuman world: as illustration she mentions calls placed to Los Angeles emergency services during the blackout following the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The callers' worries? A strange, glittering cloud in the night sky, like dust or snowflakes...which turned out to be the Milky Way, visible for once over the darkened sprawl.

One might expect that a popular book on "the evolution of artificial light" would include plenty of accessible yet concise technical information on the subject supported by lots of figures and diagrams. Well, not in this case. The focus here is mainly on the effects that artificial lighting has had on society as a whole as well as on individuals - working lives, leisure activities, social interactions, etc., and on the dependence that humans have acquired on the new technologies. Hence, some technical information is presented but kept to a minimum. The types of lighting that are discussed as the story unfolds include mosses, twigs, tallow candles, lamps that burned whale oil, kerosene and, eventually, gas, and finally incandescent light bulbs, fluorescent lights and even LEDs. Advantages and disadvantages are briefly presented in each case. Light pollution is also touched upon as well as its effects on wildlife and on astronomical observations (by the way, the Hale telescope on Mount Palomar has a 200-inch mirror and not a 200-inch lens as erroneously noted in the book). Some space is also devoted to energy/electricity supply and demand.

The writing style is generally friendly and accessible and even quite captivating at times; but, as has already been remarked by some reviewers, the prose can also be rather awkward, i.e., too many passages border on the quasi poetic. Since understanding such a style is not my forte, I had to read some of these passages several times in trying to make sense of them, often to no avail. Also, as noted earlier, the book contains no diagrams or figures whatsoever; a few would have been quite useful for illustrative purposes, given the book's subject matter.

Despite the (periodic) rather gauche writing style, overall, the book is interesting and contains much fascinating information. As such, it would likely be of interest to a broad readership.

In a poetic, lyrical style mixed with equal parts journalistic reporting and historical research, Brox does a nice job of capturing a shadowy subject -- artificial light, what it has given us and what it has taken away.

From miners using the purifying flesh of luminescent fish to Inuits with seal blubber candles made of moss and stone, from seamstresses with tallow candles magnified through water lenses to arc lamps in industrial settings, from whalers wading about in the skulls of thoughtful mammals to extract candle-fixings to the electric avenues of the White City (a name with perhaps unintentionally racial undertones), our efforts to beat the back night have driven and defined our industrial and social evolution.

I was struck by how light - and electricity - may have helped speed gender equality as women were freed from onerous and all-consuming household chores. At the same time, artificial light opened the night for continued work, in some ways probably cementing a capitalist system that increasingly dehumanized workers of both genders. A push, perhaps.

The parts that really sing are the musing about what light pollution does for our psyches (not to mention astronomy) and what it means to be cut off from the natural cycles of day and night. Even as she reports on how the "lesser animals" are disoriented, sometimes fatally, by the false daylight, neuroscience continues to find troubling evidence of how disrupted circadian rhythms can sabotage health.

There's much more that needs to be written on this subject, but this is a fine place to start and I recommend it. I'll never blow out a candle or look at a constellation without drawing some memory from this enjoyable book.

With this sort of book - an examination of an event, a process, an evolution - sometimes the complaint is a lack of continuity. Readers bemoan, and rightfully, what is little more than a collection of facts and anecdotes. In some particular order, yes, but not much of one. That complaint can't be made about Jane Brox's "Brilliant."

Brox establishes a beginning thread, then writes along it to enlighten the reader (sorry, I just couldn't resist) as to the role of artificial light - which is to say any light after sundown other than moonlight - as the reigning hallmark of civilization. She successfully depicts artificial light as inextricable from the social, creative and industrial evolution that has led to our modern life.

I imagine a stylized seminal moment, maybe ten thousand years ago, which might have been the beginning of the beginning of cities. In my setting a lone traveler is making his way as the sun fades. He spots a fire - small and contained, therefore made by a human - and heads toward it. By good luck, he and the other human speak the same words. The two spend the night in the circle of the fire glow, in some comfort given by the radiant heat from the fire. Our traveler has a rabbit hanging from the cord around his waist. The fire maker has gathered some berries and roots. They combine their holdings, eat well and converse. The anxiety and resultant depression in each human is abated. Your version will likely be different, but I'll bet whatever it is it includes a flame driving back the darkness.

In the movie "All the President's Men" Deep Throat, in the shadows of the parking garage, reveals his presence to Woodward not with a shuffle or by clearing his throat, but by striking a match. The metaphor is obvious, yet so right for the moment it is also delicious. As much as language - maybe more - a gem of light within darkness defines human beings on planet Earth.

Today we take electricity on demand as granted, barely giving this tool a first thought, much less a second. We tend to view electricity as something almost as natural as rain. One of Brox's resultant subtexts is a display of the millions of Americans who lived the nineteenth century well into the twentieth. In some cases there were still rural areas in America without electricity as late as 1960, of people still living by kerosene light and unable to lighten their endless farm work by using electric motors. Yes, at the dawn of the Space Age some distant farmers still lived and worked in the halo of chemical burning.

Jimmy Carter contributes several anecdotes about his flame-lit boyhood in southern Georgia. The same Jimmy Carter, of course, who was born well into the twentieth century and who would become a nuclear engineer and President.

(Some of the lesser reviews for this book fault Brox for technical mistakes, which are, in fact, in the text. I think this shortcoming lies more with the current state of publishing (i.e., the demise of editors) than with Brox. As well, this book is about the social impact of artificial lighting much more than the technical aspects, although I certainly learned a lot about the limitations, and frequent monitoring, any light with a flame required. A few minutes spent on the web page for this book indicates this content.)

Those who pick-up "Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light" expecting an accurate and informative history of electrical lighting will be disappointed, as it soon becomes painfully obvious that Ms. Brox knows next to nothing about electricity, even on the most basic and simple level.

For instance, on pages 148-149 she describes giant "Tesla polyphase motors" *transmitting* power from the hydroelectric station at Niagara Falls. (I thought that everyone knew that motors consume, not transmit, energy. I guess I was wrong.) On page 164, she writes, "If a family purchased a stove, which required insulated wires, or a refrigerator, which ran on higher than normal wattage [sic], they usually had to upgrade the wiring in their home." In my capacity as a slumlord, I have worked on the wiring of many old homes, built during W.W.I and in the 1920s, many of which had the original porcelain knob-and-tube wiring (before the advent of Romex®), and I have yet to see any wiring which was originally devoid of insulation.

And Ms. Brox seems baffled by other household appliances as well! On the topic of New York's 1965 power blackout (curiously, there is no mention of the much larger 2003 blackout which crippled the entire northeastern US and Ontario) she writes, "Gas crews went from house to house to check the pilot lights -- which were powered by electricity -- in the stoves and boilers of every customer." (pg.246)

Her nescience of all things electrical leads her to wander off topic for much of the book. The first third of "Brilliant" (an ironic title, considering the quality of the book) discourses on candles and lanterns -- which, until the 19th century, used animal sources as fuel -- and this leads to an entire chapter on whaling (most of her information comes from a thorough reading of Moby Dick) including a description of a whale's anatomy and diet. That's right; we learn all about baleen in a book about lighting.

Later chapters likewise cover topics only tangentially related to lighting. There are eight pages devoted to the story of the London Blitz during W.W.II, followed by three pages about air raid drills in New York. She spends several pages decrying the injustice of how African-Americans were treated at the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 as well as bigotry in general. In a book about lighting.

One of my favorite events in American history is the War of the Currents waged in the 1880s between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, who favored Nikola Tesla's alternating-current system (which also employed transformers developed by Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs -- their names never appear in this book). It takes a perverse talent to ruin this bizarre story, but Ms. Brox manages to do so. There is no mention of the execution of William Kemmler in the first electric chair, a device which was invented by a man under Edison's pay and at Edison's behest so as to demonstrate the perils of alternating current. (Edison said that Kemmler had been "Westinghoused.") This explains why we in North America are still burdened with inefficient 117-volt home lighting and appliances, while the rest of the world (mostly) enjoys 230-volt service, but that's apparently all too complex for Ms. Brox, and she instead makes such banal observations as, "Most American households at the turn of the twentieth century were much brighter than those of the past." (pg.156)

A thorough account of the War of the Currents can be found in Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla, & the Electric Chair by Th. Metzger, a far more talented writer.

In The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914, British author Gavin Weightman makes a cogent argument that Edison invented nothing, and incandescent lighting was instead developed in England: "The use of [Joseph] Swan's lamps in Godalming in 1881 was the first practical use of the modern light bulb." Weightman, I suspect, may be biased, but if you're interested in a thorough and well-researched account of the development of electric lighting, that'd be the book to get.

Reading this book was like listening to a well-educated and interesting friend.

The reader gets the impression the author did a lot of research and wanted to share it all, but had to select only the highlights (no pun intended) to fill a single volume. Each chapter leaves the reader wanting to learn more about the social, economic and ecological impact of artificial light.

Thanks Jane for a fascinating read.

This book is not as good as the dust jacket reviewer's claim.
Some of the narrative, particularly about early forms of lighting (e.g. torches, oil lamps, kerosene lamps, etc.) was informative. The bulk of the book, however is about electrical lighting, blackouts, light pollution, etc., which is all familiar and repetitious.