The first electric lamp. Who invented electric street lighting. The advent of electric light sources

Powerful illumination of megacities, street lighting of small settlements have made the life of modern people active, regardless of the time of day. At the same time, no one thinks about the question - who invented electric street lighting , and how the lanterns were made.

The first street lamps and their creators

Artificial street lighting has been in use since the 15th century. The very first lantern gave a small area of illumination, as it used paraffin candles or hemp oil. Thanks to kerosene, the level of brightness on the streets was increased. But a revolutionary breakthrough occurred when the first electric lamp was invented, in the construction of which carbon filaments were used first, and then tungsten and molybdenum filaments.

Jan van der Heyden

In the 17th century, the Dutch artist and inventor Hayden proposed placing oil lanterns along the streets of Amsterdam. Thanks to the system invented by Hayden, in 1668 the number of people falling into canals that were not fenced was reduced, the number of crimes on the streets decreased, and the work of firefighters was facilitated when extinguishing fires.

William Murdoch

In the 19th century, William Murdoch put forward an interesting idea about a way to light the streets with gas, but they laughed at him. Contrary to ridicule, Murdoch clearly proved that this is possible. So in the streets of London in 1807 the first gas lighting devices caught fire. A little later, the design of the inventor spread to other capitals of Europe.

Pavel Yablochkov

In 1876, Russian engineer Pavel Nikolaevich Yablochkov invented an electric candle and installed it in a glass sphere. The design was simple but effective. A carbon thread passed over the candles. When in contact with current, the thread burned out, and an arc ignited between the candles. This phenomenon, called arc electricity, marked the beginning of the first electrical appliances. Russian "candles", as they were called, were installed on Liteiny Bridge in 1879. Also, 12 Yablochkov lamps were lit on the drawbridge across the Neva. The invention of electric street lighting marked the beginning of a new era in the use of electric current.

An interesting fact: in 1883, during the coronation of Emperor Alexander III, thanks to incandescent lamps, a circular zone near the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Kremlin was illuminated.

The fruits of the invention were used in European capitals.
Parisian and Berlin streets, shops, coastal areas - everything was illuminated by street lamps created using this Yablochkov technology. Residents called street illumination symbolically: "Russian light", and Pavel Yablochkov, a Russian engineer who invented electric street lighting, became known at that time in all enlightened circles of Europe.

However, after many world capitals were illuminated by the bright but short-lived light of the arc electricity of Yablochkov's "candles", these devices lasted only a few years. They were replaced by more advanced incandescent lamps. The invention of the Russian engineer was practically forgotten, and Pavel Nikolayevich himself died in poverty in the provincial Saratov.

A new stage in the development of street lighting

A significant contribution to the development of electric street lighting was made by the Russian scientist Alexander Nikolaevich Lodygin and the American Thomas Alva Edison.

Lodygin created the design of a light bulb, the basis of which he took molybdenum and tungsten filaments twisted in a spiral. It was a breakthrough in the field of electrical discoveries. One of the most important criteria for a lighting device is the duration of operation. It was Lodygin who raised the resource of his lamps from 30 minutes to several hundred hours of operation. He was the first to use lamps with a vacuum, pumping air out of them. This made it possible to greatly extend the life of the lighting device.

For the first time, Lodygin's incandescent lamps appeared in the street lighting of Odessa Street in St. Petersburg in 1873.

Having received a patent and a prize for his invention, Alexander Nikolaevich could not distribute it to the masses. The talented engineer did not have entrepreneurial acumen and could not bring production to the required scale.

Another engineer, the American Thomas Edison, was distinguished by perseverance in achieving his goal. It was he who, taking Lodygin's invention as a basis, improved its design and was able to introduce it into widespread production. This is not to say that Edison received his fame undeservedly. After all, he stubbornly conducted thousands of experiments and developed a very important stage in electric lighting - from the current source to the consumer, which made it possible to launch electric lighting on the scale of entire cities.

So, thanks to the knowledge of the Russian engineer Lodygin and the agility of the American scientist Edison, electric street lighting replaced gas lamps.

What did the first lights look like? video

According to history, the first attempts to use artificial lighting in urban streets belong to the beginning of the 15th century.

Back in 1417, the mayor of London, Henry Barton, gave the order to hang street lamps winter evenings. He took this step in order to dispel the impenetrable darkness in the British capital. The French decided not to lag behind and, after some time, took up his initiative.

baselon lanterns gaudí

At the very beginning of the 16th century, every inhabitant of the French capital was obliged to keep lamps at the windows that face the street. It was under Louis XIV that Paris was filled with the lights of numerous lanterns. In 1667, he issued a decree on street lighting, for which he received the nickname "King Sun". According to legend, it was thanks to this decree that the reign of Louis was called brilliant.

Venice

The first street lamps gave relatively little light, since they used ordinary candles and oil. After, when they began to use kerosene, they significantly increased the brightness of lighting, but the real revolution of street light happened only at the beginning of the 19th century, when gas lamps appeared. They were invented by an Englishman - inventor William Murdoch. Naturally, at first he was ridiculed.
Voronezh

Walter Scott himself wrote to one of his friends that some madman was proposing to light London with smoke. These taunts did not stop Murdoch from bringing his idea to life, and he successfully demonstrated the benefits of gas lighting.

Germany

In 1807, lanterns of a new design were installed on Pall Mall and soon conquered all European capitals. In Russia, street lighting appeared under Peter I.

Egypt

In 1706, he ordered to hang lanterns on the facades of some houses near the Peter and Paul Fortress to celebrate the victory over the Swedes near Kalisz.

Kyiv This chandelier serves as a street lamp near a cafe

In 1718, the first stationary lamps appeared on the streets of St. Petersburg, and 12 years later, Empress Anna Ioannovna ordered them to be installed in Moscow.

China

The history of electric lighting is associated primarily with the names of the Russian inventor Alexander Lodygin and the American Thomas Edison.

Lviv

In 1873, Lodygin designed a carbon incandescent lamp, for which he received the Lomonosov Prize from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Such lamps were soon used to illuminate the St. Petersburg Admiralty. A few years later, Edison demonstrated an improved light bulb - brighter and cheaper to manufacture.

Moscow

With its advent, gas lamps quickly disappeared from city streets, giving way to electric ones.

Budapest

in Bryansk

Venice

Vienna

Dubrovnik

Castle Egg Bavaria Alps

Zichron Yaakov 19th century

Spain

China city Shenzhen

Kronstadt

London

Lviv

Moscow

Over Damascus

Odessa

Paris

Shevchenko Park Kyiv

Peter

Siena turtle area

Rome

Talin

Look around, the world is still full of beauty...

In 1417, the mayor of London, Henry Barton, ordered that lanterns be hung out on winter evenings to dispel the impenetrable darkness in the British capital. After some time, the French took up his initiative. At the beginning of the 16th century, the inhabitants of Paris were obliged to keep lamps near the windows that face the street. Under Louis XIV, the French capital was filled with the lights of numerous lanterns. The "Sun King" issued a special decree on street lighting in 1667. According to legend, it was thanks to this decree that the reign of Louis was called brilliant.

The first street lamps gave relatively little light, since they used ordinary candles and oil. The use of kerosene made it possible to significantly increase the brightness of lighting, but the real revolution of street light happened only at the beginning of the 19th century, when gas lamps appeared. Their inventor - the Englishman William Murdoch - was initially ridiculed. Walter Scott wrote to one of his friends that some madman was proposing to light London with smoke. Despite such remarks, Murdoch successfully demonstrated the benefits of gas lighting. In 1807, lanterns of a new design were installed on Pall Mall and soon conquered all European capitals.

Petersburg became the first city in Russia where street lamps appeared. On December 4, 1706, on the day of the celebration of the victory over the Swedes, at the direction of Peter I, street lamps were hung on the facades of the streets facing the Peter and Paul Fortress. The tsar and the townspeople liked the innovation, the lanterns began to be lit for all the big holidays, and thus the beginning of street lighting in St. Petersburg was laid. In 1718, Tsar Peter I issued a decree on “lighting the streets of the city of St. Petersburg” (the decree on lighting the capital city was signed by Empress Anna Ioannovna only in 1730). The design of the first outdoor oil lantern was designed by Jean Baptiste Leblon, an architect and "a skillful technician of many different arts, of great importance in France." In the autumn of 1720, 4 striped beauties made at the Yamburg glass factory were exhibited on the Neva embankment near the Petrovsky Winter Palace. Glazed lamps were fastened on metal rods on wooden poles with white and blue stripes. Hemp oil burned in them. So we got regular street lighting.

In 1723, thanks to the efforts of Chief of Police Anton Divier, 595 lanterns were lit on the most eminent streets of the city. This light economy was served by 64 lamplighters. The approach to business was scientific. Lanterns were lit from August to April, focusing on the "tables of dark hours" that were sent from the Academy.

The historian of St. Petersburg I.G.Georgi describes this street lighting as follows: “For this, there are wooden poles painted with blue and white paint along the streets, each of which supports a spherical lantern on an iron rod, lowered on a block for cleaning and pouring oil ...”

Petersburg was the first city in Russia and one of the few in Europe where regular street lighting appeared just twenty years after its foundation. Oil lanterns proved to be tenacious - they burned in the city every day for 130 years. Frankly speaking, there was little light from them. In addition, they strove to splash passers-by with hot drops of oil. "Further, for God's sake, further from the lantern!" - we read in Gogol's story Nevsky Prospekt, - “and as soon as possible, pass by as soon as possible. It’s still happiness if you get off with the fact that he will flood your smart frock coat with smelly oil.

Illumination of the northern capital was a profitable business, and the merchants were willing to do it. They received a bonus for each burning lantern and therefore the number of lanterns in the city began to increase. So, by 1794, there were already 3,400 lanterns in the city, much more than in any European capital. Moreover, the lanterns in St. Petersburg (in the design of which such famous architects as Rastrelli, Felten, Montferrand took part) were considered the most beautiful in the world.

The lighting was not perfect. At all times there have been complaints about the quality of street lighting. The lanterns shine dimly, sometimes they do not burn at all, they are extinguished ahead of time. There was even an opinion that lamplighters save themselves oil for porridge.

For decades, oil has been burned in lanterns. Entrepreneurs understood the profitability of lighting and began to look for new ways to generate income. From Ser. 18th century Kerosene was used in lanterns. In 1770, the first lantern team of 100 people was created. (recruits), in 1808 she was assigned to the police. In 1819 on the Aptekarsky island. gas lamps appeared, and in 1835 the St. Petersburg Society for Gas Lighting was established. Alcohol lamps appeared in 1849. The city was divided among various companies. Of course, it would be reasonable, for example, to replace kerosene lighting with gas lighting everywhere. But this was not profitable for oil companies, and the outskirts of the city continued to be illuminated with kerosene, since it was not profitable for the authorities to spend big money on gas. But for a long time in the evenings, lamplighters with ladders over their shoulders loomed on the city streets, hastily running from lamp to lamp.

A textbook on arithmetic survived more than one edition, where the task was given: “A lamplighter lights lanterns on a city street, running from one panel to another. The length of the street is a verst three hundred fathoms, the width is twenty fathoms, the distance between adjacent lamps is forty fathoms, the speed of the lamplighter is twenty fathoms per minute. The question is, how long will it take him to complete his work? (Answer: 64 lanterns located on this street, the lamplighter will light in 88 minutes.)

But then came the summer of 1873. An emergency announcement was made in a number of metropolitan newspapers that "On July 11, along Odessa Street, on Peski, experiments with electric street lighting will be shown to the public."

Recalling this event, one of his eyewitnesses wrote: “... I don’t remember from what sources, probably from newspapers, I learned that on such and such a day, at such and such an hour, somewhere in the Sands, will be shown to the public experiments on electric lighting with Lodygin lamps. I passionately desired to see this new electric light... Many people went with us for the same purpose. Soon we came out of the darkness into some street with bright lighting. In two street lamps, kerosene lamps were replaced by incandescent lamps, which poured out a bright white light.

A crowd had gathered on the quiet and unattractive Odessa Street. Some of the visitors took newspapers with them. At first, these people approached a kerosene lamp, and then an electric one, and compared the distance at which one could read.

In memory of this event, a memorial plaque was installed on the house number 60 on Suvorovsky Prospekt.

In 1874, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences awarded A.N. Lodygin the Lomonosov Prize for the invention of the carbon incandescent lamp. However, without receiving support from either the government or the city authorities, Lodygin was unable to establish mass production and widely use them for street lighting.

In 1879, 12 electric lamps were lit on the new Liteiny Bridge. “Candles” by P.N. Yablochkov were installed on lamps made according to the project of the architect Ts.A. "Russian light", so dubbed electric lights, made a splash in Europe. Later, these lanterns, which became legendary, were transferred to the current Ostrovsky Square. In 1880 the first electric lamps shone in Moscow. So, with the help of arc lamps in 1883, on the day of the Sacred Coronation of Alexander III, the area around the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was illuminated.

In the same year, a power plant began operating on the river. Moika at the Police Bridge (Siemens and Halske), and on December 30, 32 electric lamps illuminated Nevsky Prospekt from Bolshaya Morskaya Street to Fontanka. A year later, electric lighting appeared in neighboring streets. In 1886-99, 4 power stations were already operating for lighting needs (the Helios Society, the plant of the Belgian Society, etc.) and 213 such lamps were burning. By the beginning of the twentieth century. Petersburg had about 200 power plants. In the 1910s light bulbs with a metal filament appeared (since 1909 - tungsten lamps). On the eve of World War I, there were 13,950 street lamps in St. Petersburg (3,020 electric, 2,505 kerosene, 8,425 gas). By 1918, only electric lights lit the streets. And in 1920, even these few went out.

The streets of Petrograd were plunged into darkness for two whole years, and their lighting was restored only in 1922. Since the beginning of the 90s of the last century, much attention has been paid to artistic lighting of buildings and structures in the city. Traditionally, masterpieces of architectural art, museums, monuments, and administrative buildings are decorated in this way all over the world. Petersburg is no exception. The Hermitage, the Arch of the General Staff, the building of the Twelve Colleges, the largest St. Petersburg bridges - the Palace, Liteiny, Birzhevoy, Blagoveshchensky (former Lieutenant Schmidt, and even earlier Nikolaevsky), Alexander Nevsky ... The list goes on. Created at a high artistic and technical level, the lighting design of historical monuments gives them a special sound.

Walking along the embankments at night is an unforgettable sight! The soft light and noble design of lamps can be appreciated by citizens and guests of the city on the streets and embankments of the evening and night of St. Petersburg. And the virtuoso lighting of the bridges will emphasize their lightness and severity and create a sense of the integrity of this amazing city, located on the islands and dotted with rivers and canals.

29.05.2011

It will seem strange to many that such a simple device as familiar to everyone is a very recent invention. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that at that time houses were already almost universally lit by electric bulbs.

Most likely, the creation of a compact portable flashlight was slowed down by the fact that in those days there were no dry batteries yet. The batteries that existed at that time were containers filled with liquid electrolyte, which were difficult to carry with you. Therefore, when it comes to this invention, it is worth mentioning Karl Gassner first - it was he who in 1886 first invented and patented a battery, from which, whatever one may say, the electrolyte did not leak.

Himself, which became the prototype of modern electric flashlights, was created in 1899 by the American inventor David Maysell. In the same year, he sold his patent to the American Electrical Novelty and Manufacturing Company, which was founded by Conrad Hubert, an emigrant from Belarus. Outwardly, Maysell's invention was very reminiscent of a modern keychain flashlight, only in an enlarged form - it was a dense cardboard tube into which a light bulb with a lens and a metal reflector was mounted. Three cylindrical power sources were located inside the tube. The first flashlight had a very unusual switch in its design - in order to light it, it was necessary to press a metal ring attached to a metal hoop covering the body. This rather inconvenient design was soon replaced by a more ergonomic and reliable switch, invented by Konrad Hubert.

Since the batteries did not have a long resource, the first flashlights shone rather dimly and, unlike modern products, were used not as a source of bright light, but as a flash that could momentarily illuminate something necessary. Therefore, the Americans got the name of the portable flashlight accordingly, flashlight - a flashing light or a flash of light. But the British gave the pocket electric flashlight a different name - torch, that is, a torch. This is most likely due to the fact that these devices arrived in Foggy Albion in an improved form. Of course, it was not yet such a bright, familiar LED flashlight, but still it has undergone significant changes for the better.

All this time, Meissell and Hubert worked together to improve the design of an electric flashlight, but they became famous only when their offspring was appreciated by the New York police - the inventors handed out flashlights to them for advertising purposes.

Serial production of lanterns, which were produced under the Eveready brand, was established in 1905 by The American Ever Ready Company, into which Hubert renamed his company. Now they are widespread and can be found everywhere.