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thumb|[[Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, by Benjamin West (c. 1816, Philadelphia Museum of Art) portrays Founding Father Benjamin Franklin's interest in harnessing nature to improve the lives of his fellow human beings.]]
The history of street lighting in the United States is closely linked to the urbanization of America. Artificial illumination has stimulated commercial activity at night, and has been tied to the country's economic development, including major innovations in transportation, particularly the growth in automobile use. In the two and a half centuries before LED lighting emerged as the new "gold standard", cities and towns across America relied on oil, coal gas, carbon arc, incandescent, and high-intensity gas discharge lamps for street lighting.
Oil lamp street lighting
The earliest street lights in the colonial America were oil lamps burning whale oil from the Greenland or Arctic right whales of the North Atlantic, or from sperm whales of the South Atlantic, South Pacific, and beyond. Lamplighters were responsible for igniting the lamps and maintaining them.]]
Gas lamps gradually started replacing oil street lamps in the United States, beginning in the first quarter of the 19th century. The first US city to use gas street lights was Baltimore, starting in 1817.
Gas light was up to ten times brighter than light from oil lamps,]]
Arc lamps
The first public demonstration of outdoor electrical lighting in the US was in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 29, 1879. Inventor Charles F. Brush had been perfecting the dynamo arc light, which could produce a glow equivalent to 4,000 candles in a single lamp.
By 1917, the number of incandescent filament lamps used in street lighting had reached 1,389,000 across the United States, while the number of arc lamps had started to decline.
Mercury vapor lamps
By the mid-20th century, increasing motorization necessitated better illumination, particularly in business districts where there was more mixing of cars and pedestrians, as well as along commercial thoroughfares.
Mercury vapor streetlights started to be used more widely in the United States after 1950, mainly due to their cost efficiency. Lamp manufacturers started to promote sodium vapor lamps for "crime fighting", a marketing strategy that backfired when cities such as Newark and New Orleans rejected sodium vapor, to avoid publicly stigmatizing high-crime neighborhoods. brighter than mercury vapor light, which has been described as a "harsh metallic blue" in hue. During the OPEC oil embargo, Mayor Richard J. Daley announced a plan to make Chicago "the first large U.S. city to have sodium vapor lamps on all residential streets", replacing 85,000 mercury vapor streetlights. the newspaper's own architecture critic worried about the "eerie, ominous quality of sodium vapor illumination".
Light emitting diodes
thumb|One of the LED streetlights in Bellingham, Washington, which is individually controlled via a smart network (2016)
In recent years, efforts to make street lighting more energy efficient have focused on using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to replace high-pressure mercury (HPM), metal halide (MH), and high-pressure sodium (HPS) luminaires. LEDs also produce a whiter light, and can be installed as part of a centrally managed system with further energy saving controls, such as part-night lighting and dimming. Although the up-front costs of installing LED fixtures is significant, municipalities switching to LED street lighting generally expect to recoup their investment through reductions in ongoing electricity and maintenance costs. Most of these cities erected only one or two towers, before falling back on traditional lamppost lighting. One exception was Los Angeles, which erected 36 towers, fifteen of which were 150-feet tall and equipped with three 3,000-candlepower arc lamps each. The city of Austin purchased 31 of Detroit's used moonlight towers in 1894. The induction lamps were expected to last 100,000 hours before requiring maintenance and consume 30 to 40 percent less electricity, thereby saving an estimated $1 million annually. Astronomers from the nearby Palomar Observatory had objected to replacing the HPS lamps with light sources with higher color temperatures, which would increase light pollution and interfere with their research.
Urban Light
Urban Light at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Center, Los Angeles, is an assemblage of historical street lights taken from actual usage in Southern California in the form of a 2008 sculpture by Chris Burden.
See also
- Bartlett street lamp
- Gas lighting
- Intelligent street lighting
- Light pollution
- Light fixture
- Street lighting in the District of Columbia