I came across this in the New York Times for April 26, 1884.
Yes, this is one of the nuttiest ideas even for the early years of electricity, when everyone was besotted by electric light. In fact, I’m arguing that the full article shows it to be a spoof, an early version of Poe’s Law.
Just to make this more understandable I need to convey just how bright fifty or a hundred candle power was. From poking around I settled on saying that you can think of that as more or less equivalent to a 50 or 100 watt incandescent bulb. Am I right?
The rough conversion is 1 candlepower = 12.57 lumens, and a 60 watt incandescent bulb would produce 900 lumens. So 100 candlepower would be equivalent to an 83.8 watt incandescent bulb. All the sources indicate it’s not that simple to calculate because of the differences in what is being measured but your approximation sounds pretty good.
Are lumens and candlepower really convertible without other facts? My recollection is that candlepower is a measure of the brightness (luminous intensity, corresponding to SPL if it was sound), whereas lumens measures total output corresponding to watts, if it was sound). That is, one is amplitude, the other is energy flow rate. If it radiates spherically with equal intensity in all directions, then I suppose there’s a trivial conversion to lumens.
It’s a woman with lights attached to her clothing. The year the article came out, there was a groundbreaking ballet in London, where they sewed electric lights into the costumes, then turned down the theater lights, and the whole thing was done in the dark, illuminated just by the ballerinas.
The article starts with a mention of illuminated ballet girls, which I believe was the source of the whole spoof, a current event on which to hang it to make it more believable. However, the references I’ve found are to the premiere of La Fanandole, which took place in Paris in December 1893. That was covered heavily in Scientific American and electrical journals in early 1884.
The only references to a similar event in London I’ve found are to an opera at the Savoy with electric lights on the chorus girls playing fairies in 1882.
Do you know of another example from London in 1884? If so, I’d appreciate any information and references you could provide.
The article refers to an electric ballet at the Empire Theater in London, directed by an M. Armand Levy, who got the exclusive rights to put on electric ballet in England.
That’s dated April 25, 1884, which presents a real problem.
Today’s magazines are dated a week ahead: the date on the cover is the date they should pulled off the newsstands. I don’t know if that was the practice in 1884, and even if so I don’t see how it could have gotten to the U.S. in a week. The fastest trip ever up to that time was earlier that month, with a time of 6 days, 10 hours. That’s an impossibly small window for creating such an article.
The article itself talks about the appearance of lights onstage “a year ago” so even the Paris ballet is a bit late. That’s a great find, though, and I’ll definitely use it, but I don’t think that was the referent.
I’ve also, related to that, probably referring to the same production, found this, from the Southern Medical Record of October 1884 (The Southern Medical Record was, as the name suggests, primarily a medical journal, but it also had brief stories about interesting, unusual, or funny developments in science):
Here’s the complete article:
And looking back, it looks like the Medical Record got that from a New York publication, “The Electrical World”, published on April 12, 1884.
Sorry to add this, but I’m finding that article in various US newspapers at the beginning of April in 1884…the New Orleans Times Picayune, the Salt Lake Herald, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Wahpeton Times in what was then Dakota Territory.
My guess is that the article comes from one of the news agencies…AP or Reuters, both of which existed then, and was part of their newsfeed.
Keyword searches keep coming back to that Electrical World article of April 12, which I found earlier but doesn’t give enough information. I did find the British Newspaper Archive which includes the Pall Mall Gazette, so I’ll search through that tomorrow to see if I can pin down an article from earlier in April.
Thanks for the article reference; that’s actually a fascinating insight into how amazing the electric light must have been at the time. There were only three lights per dancer, apparently mounted in a jeweled reflector. Each “ballerina” was carrying a battery 7" x 2" x 4" weighing three pounds (carried behind a shield). So they weren’t so much doing ballet in terms of the classic whirling and pirouettes, which would have been mighty awkward with the bulky, heavy batteries and stiff cloth-covered wires of the period. Anyone remember those “dry-cell” batteries they used to use for big flashlights? It must have been something like that, unless they were still using lead-acid batteries – those would have been fun to be dancing around with.
A girl beautiful enough to launch one ship!