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Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, by Jane Brox
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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.- Sales Rank: #749001 in Books
- Published on: 2010-07-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.13" h x 6.12" w x 8.68" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
- Orange and black hardcover, with shiny cover with a light bulb design.
- 5 x 10 inces 360 pages
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
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)
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.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Brox's intriguing blend of science, cultural analysis, and social history drew diverse reactions from critics. While the Boston Globe and the Washington Post would have preferred a tightened focus on technology, others applauded her ability to illuminate the relationships between and interdependence of culture, politics, economics, and science. Brox may not be an authority on such matters, but whatever she lacks in expertise, she makes up in enthusiasm and rigorous research. Her elegant writing, engaging characterizations, succinct technical explanations, and vivid evocations of a darkened nighttime world that no longer exists compensate for a meandering narrative and some debatable conclusions. Readers may never look at their bedside lamps in the same way again.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Shines a light on an important topic
By Book Lover
I love books that show the connectedness of events, books like Bill Bryson's One Summer America 1927 and Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey. Brilliant shines a light on the world before and after Man harnessed fire, from stone lamps of the Pleistocene 40,000 years ago to the future of cool light and the concern today of light pollution. Despite some sections heavy in technical detail, Brox has a lyrical style which capture's the reader's imagination from the pitch dark streets of a medieval city to the constant drudgery of an American farm wife before the electric grid expanded to rural areas. Never before had I considered what the brightness of the night sky has done to astronomy or thought about the darker side of the TVA water project in the 1930's. This is a book that will expand your understanding and perhaps even make you ponder why the gods were outraged that Prometheus stole fire and gave it to humankind
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Good book on the history of artificial light
By Guy J. Clark
Good book on the history of artificial light. I work in the LED lighting industry (LED Driver Chips) and have an interest in lighting already, so book was a good read for me. Well written, not dry like a textbook.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
"Brilliant" is kind o' brilliant
By Fairleigh Brooks
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.)
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