I took a walk through an older neighborhood in my area and while basking under the light of the salmon high pressure sodium lanterns it got me thinking:
What type of street lighting would have been in common use in the 1950’s in a typical uptown area of say Chicago or Los Angeles as far as technology, design of the lanterns, etc?
Incandescents, or maybe those new-fangled mercury vapor jobs. Flourescents were around but never became very common in street lighting. The wiki article on the history of street lights dates mercury vapor lamps to 1948 in commercial use:
I thought Flourescents were fairly common in other countries such as Germany? I recall they were fairly ubuquitous in some cities such as Franfurt and Hamburg in the 70s and 80s?
I think that article is fairly accurate, at least concerning the US, when it says:
Maybe they were more popular elsewhere, but they would still have the drawbacks listed in the article.
And at any rate, I wish they would end their flirtation with low pressure sodiums on my main cross street. I HATE those things.
They seem to be ubiquitous at underpasses and underneath bridges in the Chicago area. Even for new construction. I hate that eerie piss-yellow glow too. What gives?
The Wikipedia is amazing.
There’s a 1951 picture of Michigan Ave. in Chicago here.
On the left is a globe covering an incandescent light.
I remember Chicago changing to mercury vapor lights in the late 1950s. That globe light was typical downtown. There were probably some more ornate lights still used. Search for “Chicago Wrigley” here Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection >> Home for some shots of the same area in 1941.
More Chicago history here: http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/
Man I do love the Cushman Collection. Couple of interesting example I found. Pick “Cushman ID Number” in the top dropdown on the linked page and enter 1449.12. Also check out 847.18. Both date to the late 40’s. They show an exposed incandescent fixture with a shield above the bulb to reflect the light downwards. But I note that on a lot of the Chicago neighborhoods, espeically the poorer ones, there doesn’t appear to be much of any street lighting at all.
Mine had giant incandesent lightbulbs. When I was a kid a worker gave me one of the burned out bulbs. Coolness.
Back in the mid 70’s, the city of Tacoma replaced all the incandescent street lights (very cool glass globes on precast concrete poles) with ugly green aluminum poles with flourescent lighting in the neighborhood in which my grandmother lived. Within a few months many of the lights quit working, others had ballasts that went wonky and messed up the TV reception for those that lived within a few hundred feed of the offending light fixture. For a few weeks, my grandmother could not watch TV after dark because of a bad light. The problem went away when a neighbor cut the power wire to the light. A few years later the new lights were removed and mercury vapor lights were installed on telephone poles.
They are very efficient, so they conserve power, and they have long lives. This means they are cheap to operate. They also help combat light pollution, which was part of the reasoning in the South Bay (San Jose and adjoining communities). Lick Observatory is on Mount Hamilton overlooking the area. I still don’t like them for street lights. I don’t mind them so much in parking lots, although it makes it harder to pick out your car since you can’t tell colors. I used to have a red car which turned a very odd shade of charcoal gray under SOX lights.