Example of a kerosene street lamp from another town (internet download). Click on photos to enlarge. |
Night lighting via oil or kerosene lamps was not a novel
concept. In cities, people out afoot at night could hire lantern-bearers to escort
them from place to place. By the mid-1700s Paris had thousands of oil lamps.
Kerosene, which burned cleaner than plant or animal (whale) oils, was
originally made by heating coal in the absence of oxygen, liberating coal gas,
coal tar and crude kerosene – then known as coal oil. Processes extracting and
purifying kerosene were perfected and patented in the 1850s. In time, petroleum
became the preferred raw material for extracting kerosene, as it is today. Kerosene
(also known as paraffin oil) is used in heaters and for cooking in areas of the
world without access to natural gas.
Kerosene road torches, also called smudge pots, pre-dated battery-powered
lights as a means of indicating road construction barriers. The most popular
model was THE TOLEDO TORCH (Internet download).
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People of a certain age may remember driving through
construction sites at night, the sides of the road sporting 55-gallon metal
barrels as barriers, and instead of battery-powered lights, kerosene-burning road torches, which were black, rounded top, a bit smaller than a bowling ball,
open-flame. The effect of this lurid, flickering light was to make one feel one
was driving through hell, or if not hell, a road next door to hell.
September 1, 1902 saw a contact between the Town of Maynard
and the American Woolen Company (AWC) to provide power for 92 electric lights.
As with back in the kerosene days, the lights were not turned on during nights
when moonlight sufficed, and were not lit all night. Over years, the extent of electric
lighting expanded both for area and nights’ duration. News items in the
September 1920 newspaper noted that a proposal was being considered to expand
night lighting hours from eight hours to all night, at an estimated revised operating
cost of $22 per light per year. At that time Maynard has approximately 250
street lights.
Circa 1931, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston
began supplying power, there having been contentious debate that the American
Woolen Company charged more than market rates for its monopoly on electric
power. An engineers’ trivia fact here is that AWC power was 40-cycle
alternating current while the U.S. national standard had settled on 60-cycle
(many countries use 50-cycle). A lower frequency had the advantage of less
power loss during transmission, the downside being a noticeable flicker in
incandescent light bulbs and arc-type street lamps that were common back then.
Today, Maynard’s several thousand street lights are all LEDs
(light emitting diodes) with the exception of early 20th century
style ‘historic’ fixtures in downtown locations. The conversion to LEDs was
expensive, but power requirements are lower, and the lights are supposed to
last 15-20 years, so maintenance costs are lower. Additional advantages over
the replaced yellow-tinted sodium lamps and white-tinted metal halide lamps included
reducing glare impact on night vision and less light pollution. One negative is
that street-directed LEDs leave sidewalks relatively dark. This can be remedied
by adding sidewalk-directed lights. Unknowns include the long-term effects of
LED street light wavelengths (less yellow, more blue and green) on plants and
nocturnal animals.