Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 233374
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 227
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0520203542
Dewey Decimal Number: 900
EAN: 9780520203549
ASIN: 0520203542
Publication Date: December 20, 1995
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Amazon.com Review
The story of the development of artificial light in the 19th century is not only a history of its technology but a revelation of how that technology helped forge modern consciousness. The range of subjects includes the political symbolism of streetlamps, the rise of nightlife and the shop window, and the importance of the salon in the bourgeois culture. Very Highly Recommended.
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| Customer Reviews:
 From fire light to near sunlight day and night July 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Those books that you missed or wished you had read, good books in great shape hardback or paperback.
The industrialization of light follows the need to see in the dark and dust from the flickering fire and torch to the 21st century.
Mankind lost and gained when he went from burning branches to the 21st century lighting. We needed to see well when we started learning how to put nature to work and create knowledge and put it to work. As a person in his eightyfourth year of life, from lil lamps to inflourescent better lighting was a necesity created by an invention. I remember gas lighting but this book filled me in on the things of this great trip that I did not know and helped me understand the stops along the way.
We lost some family togetherness but we gained a foothold on life.
 Disenchanted Night June 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book has five main sections: The Lamp; The Street; Night Life; The Drawing Room; The Stage. As the publisher's blurb says: "[The author] tells the story of the development of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of a technology, [this book] reveals the ways that the technology of artificial illumination helped forge the modern consciousness."
The first main section, The Lamp, discusses the development of the gas lamp and the consequent municipal control over home gas lighting, as well as the new dangers of explosion and gas poisoning. It proceeds to the development of electric lighting and tells how "Edison developed the central electricity station on the model of the gas-works just as seventy years earlier Winsor had conceived a central gas supply along the lines of the water supply." (64)
The second main section, The Street, is initially more about the sociological effects of the increasing illumination of the urban night, and the relation of street lighting to political power. With the advent of electric street lights, the author focuses again on the technological side, for example, the hopes to use arc lighting as an artificial sun to illuminate an entire city from a single lamp.
The third main section, Night Life, is a brief look at the "lighting of festivity" in contrast to the previous section, which concerned the "lighting of order". (137) Night life "derives its own special atmosphere from the light that falls onto the pavements and streets from shops,... cafes and restaurants.... It is advertising light - commercialized festive illumination - in contrast to street light, the lighting of a police order. Commercial light is to police light what bourgeois society is to the state." (142)
The next main section, The Drawing Room, tells us this room, also called the parlor or living room, remained unlit by electric light in homes using electric light in other rooms. Gas light was diffused through lamp shades, just as sunlight was diffused through muslin window curtains. Later, when electric light entered the drawing room, lamp shades became darker or multi-colored in the manner, for example, of Tiffany, and window curtains became heavier, more opaque, to more severely filter sunlight, and at night to block the entrance of bright lighting from the street.
The final main section, The Stage, tells us there were difficulties getting stage lighting to appear natural. The closer foot light lit brighter than the more distant side lights, giving, as one reviewer wrote, the appearance of light "coming straight from Hell." Being lit from below, the actors looked unnatural, their faces "grotesque masks". Yet it was only within the light of the foot lights that subtle facial expressions could be discerned. Only within this band of light at the front of the stage were the actors most clearly seen. The introduction of electric light removed these difficulties, but this new brighter lighting washed away the illusions previously created by scenery designed to work under dimmer and less pervasive illumination. Color, too, was perceived differently under electric light.
Enchanted Lighting April 29, 2008
An amazing book, "Disenchanted Night" begins with the physical constraints, the actual production of light and then takes it through the nature of public order, the idea of shpping and the creation of mass nightlife and off into the theater. Once one has read this book, the nineteenth century will never seem the same and the world before, lit only by fire, is revealed much more strongly.
What is absolutely fascinating in which ideas of public order, commerce, art and even interior decorating are shown to be as much technical artifacts as ideological categories. In a way the sections on Street Lighting and Shops are almost a technological addendum to Bakhtin.
In short: Read this book.
illuminating reading October 18, 2002
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This rather obscure book shouldn't be; a very meticulous and perceptive history of an important subject, the history of artificial light, Schivelbusch provides excellent research and, significantly, adds unexpected observations along the way, such as the political dimension of artificial light, light as an expression of statist control. Highly recommended.
Fascinating May 4, 1999
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
An interesting treatment that focuses on the social aspects of technology, and a useful reminder of way of life that seems long past but is chronologically recent.
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