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Public attention was attracted to 'oil-gas' by the display of the patent apparatus at Apothecary's Hall, by Taylor & Martineau. In 1815, John Taylor patented an apparatus for the decomposition of 'oil' and other animal substances. Oil-gas appeared in the field as a rival of coal-gas. By 1857, the Grands Boulevards were all lit with gas a Parisian writer enthused in August 1857: 'That which most enchants the Parisians is the new lighting by gas of the boulevards.From the church of the Madeleine all the way to rue Montmartre, these two rows of lamps, shining with a clarity white and pure, have a marvelous effect.' The gaslights installed on the boulevards and city monuments in the 19th century gave the city the nickname 'The City of Light.' The first gas lamps on the main streets of Paris appeared in January 1829 on the place du Carrousel and the rue de Rivoli, then on the rue de la Paix, place Vendôme, and rue de Castiglione. In Paris, public street lighting was first installed on a covered shopping street, the Passage des Panoramas, in 1817, private interior gas lighting having been previously demonstrated in a house on the rue Saint-Dominique seventeen years prior. Another early adopter was the city of Baltimore, where the gas lights were first demonstrated at Rembrandt Peale's Museum in 1816, and Peale's Gas Light Company of Baltimore provided the first gas streetlights in the United States. The first place outside London in England to have gas lighting, was Preston, Lancashire in 1816, where Joseph Dunn's Preston Gaslight Company introduced a new, brighter gas lighting. įollowing this success, gas lighting spread outside London, both within Britain and abroad. Less than two years later, on 31 December 1813, the Westminster Bridge was lit by gas. In 1812, Parliament granted a charter to the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company, and the first gas company in the world came into being. The first public street lighting with gas was demonstrated in Pall Mall, London on 28 January 1807 by Frederick Albert Winsor. During the French Revolution (1789–1799), the revolutionaries found that the lampposts were a convenient place to hang aristocrats and other opponents. These lamps were attached to the top of lampposts by 1817, there were 4,694 lamps on the Paris streets. The light shed from these réverbères was considerably brighter, enough that some people complained of glare.

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Under this system, streets were lit with lanterns suspended 20 yards (18 m) apart on a cord over the middle of the street at a height of 20 feet (6.1 m) as an English visitor enthused in 1698, 'The streets are lit all winter and even during the full moon!' In London, public street lighting was implemented around the end of the 17th century a diarist wrote in 1712 that 'All the way, quite through Hyde Park to the Queen's Palace at Kensington, lanterns were placed for illuminating the roads on dark nights.' Ī much-improved oil lantern, called a réverbère, was introduced in 1745 and improved in subsequent years. Paris had more than 2,700 street lights by the end of the 17th century, and twice as many by 1730. King Louis XIV authorized sweeping reforms in Paris in 1667, which included the installation and maintenance of lights on streets and at intersections, as well as stiff penalties for vandalizing or stealing the fixtures. Still, in the mid 17th century it was a common practice for travelers to hire a lantern-bearer if they had to move at night through the dark, winding streets. In 1588 the Parisian Parliament decreed that a torch be installed and lit at each intersection, and in 1594 the police changed this to lanterns. Public street lighting was first developed in the 16th century, and accelerated following the invention of lanterns with glass windows, which greatly improved the quantity of light. According to some sources, illumination was ordered in London in 1417 by Sir Henry Barton, Mayor of London though there is no firm evidence of this. The earliest lamps required that a lamplighter tour the town at dusk, lighting each of the lamps. In the Middle Ages, so-called ' link boys' escorted people from one place to another through the murky winding streets of medieval towns.īefore incandescent lamps, candle lighting was employed in cities. A slave responsible for lighting the oil lamps in front of Roman villas was called a lanternarius. At that time oil lamps were used predominantly as they provided a long-lasting and moderate flame. Main articles: Oil lamp and Gas lighting Preindustrial era Įarly lamps were used by Greek and Roman civilizations, where light primarily served the purpose of security, both to protect the wanderer from tripping on the path over something or keeping the potential robbers at bay.