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Author: Sandy Isenstadt Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 026203817X Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
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.
Author: Sandy Isenstadt Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 026203817X Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
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.
Author: Robert Friedel Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801899443 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
In September 1878, Thomas Alva Edison brashly—and prematurely—proclaimed his breakthrough invention of a workable electric light. That announcement was followed by many months of intense experimentation that led to the successful completion of his Pearl Street station four years later. Edison was not alone—nor was he first—in developing an incandescent light bulb, but his was the most successful of all competing inventions. Drawing from the documents in the Edison archives, Robert Friedel and Paul Israel explain how this came to be. They explore the process of invention through the Menlo Park notes, discussing the full range of experiments, including the testing of a host of materials, the development of such crucial tools as the world's best vacuum pump, and the construction of the first large-scale electrical generators and power distribution systems. The result is a fascinating story of excitement, risk, and competition. Revised and updated from the original 1986 edition, this definitive study of the most famous invention of America's most famous inventor is completely keyed to the printed and electronic versions of the Edison Papers, inviting the reader to explore further the remarkable original sources.
Author: Ernest Freeberg Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143124447 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
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.
Author: Mark Essig Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0802719287 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
Thomas Edison stunned America in 1879 by unveiling a world-changing invention--the light bulb--and then launching the electrification of America's cities. A decade later, despite having been an avowed opponent of the death penalty, Edison threw his laboratory resources and reputation behind the creation of a very different sort of device--the electric chair. Deftly exploring this startling chapter in American history, Edison & the Electric Chair delivers both a vivid portrait of a nation on the cusp of modernity and a provocative new examination of Edison himself. Edison championed the electric chair for reasons that remain controversial to this day. Was Edison genuinely concerned about the suffering of the condemned? Was he waging a campaign to smear his rival George Westinghouse's alternating current and boost his own system? Or was he warning the public of real dangers posed by the high-voltage alternating wires that looped above hundreds of America's streets? Plumbing the fascinating history of electricity, Mark Essig explores America's love of technology and its fascination with violent death, capturing an era when the public was mesmerized and terrified by an invisible force that produced blazing light, powered streetcars, carried telephone conversations--and killed.
Author: Adam Allerhand Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company ISBN: 9789811227059 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Following the critically acclaimed An Illustrated History of Electric Lighting (2016), Professor Emeritus Adam Allerhand of Indiana University, USA, is back with yet another masterpiece. Starting from 1300 BC and progressing steadily to the present, this book is the ultimate guide to the history of the science of electricity. It is the result of 15 years of research through a vast and daunting literature which is hard for beginners and experts alike to navigate, bringing together many widely scattered and obscure facts that have hitherto eluded even the most ardent aficionados. There is particular emphasis on practical applications, including electricity for illumination, communication, medicine and industry. For non-specialists with an interest in the subject, fret not, for the text is written with a minimum of technical jargon, and is richly illustrated with over 100 images, many of them created by the author.
Author: Jill Jonnes Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0375758844 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
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.
Author: Jane Brox Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 0547487150 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 382
Book Description
This “superb history” of artificial light traces the evolution of society—“invariably fascinating and often original . . . [it] amply lives up to its title” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In Brilliant, Jane Brox explores humankind’s ever-changing relationship to artificial light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. More than a survey of technological development, this sweeping history reveals how artificial light changed our world, and how those social and cultural changes in turn led to the pursuit of more ways of spreading, maintaining, and controlling light. Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn’t—through the centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She identifies the pursuit of whale oil as the first time the need 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 bulbs produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox’s informative portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light
Author: Sandy Isenstadt
Author: Sandy Isenstadt
Author: Robert Friedel
Author: Ernest Freeberg
Author: Brian Bowers
Author: Mark Essig
Author: Lewis Howard Latimer
Author: Adam Allerhand
Author: Jill Jonnes
Author: Edison Electric Light Company
Author: Jane Brox