By the Light of the Moon: Tower Lighting in the U.S.

• In Event: History After Dark: Histories of Nighttime Environments and Cultures

Abstract

This paper considers the short life and afterlife of one of the experimental nineteenth-century technologies called “moon towers” or “moonlight towers.” These towers, between 150 and 200 feet tall and made of wrought iron or gas pipes, had four to six Brush arc lamps on top. One tower was able to light several blocks in all directions. Unlike most cities that had an assortment of public lighting technologies, Detroit was the only large city in the world lighted wholly by the tower system with 122 towers that lit 21 square miles, installed in the early 1880s. The reviews were mixed. Though they were less expensive to operate than gas streetlights, the quality of the light was poor. Residents complained about the “ghastly glare” and the shadows that were so black that they provided “hiding-places for those of evil intent.” Within a decade Detroit, like other cities, lost their enthusiasm for their tower systems and began to dismantle them. No one wanted them, but Austin was the curious exception. Just when most cities were trying to get rid of them, Austin bought thirty-one towers from Detroit in 1894. By the 1920s most cities had completely removed them, but Austin couldn’t afford to dismantle their towers so they left them. The arc lamps were replaced with incandescent and then mercury vapor lamps in the 1930s and conventional street lighting was installed in the city. In the mid-1970s the towers were put on the National Register of Historic Places and Austin now has the country’s only surviving moon towers. These towers are not simply museum artifacts and examples of a long-gone experimental technology, they have been enthusiastically embraced by Austinites and become an important part of the popular culture, helped when they were immortalized in Richard Linklater’s film Dazed and Confused.

Author

• Anne Beamish, Kansas State University