Artificial Light eBook

Matthew Luckiesh
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about Artificial Light.

Artificial Light eBook

Matthew Luckiesh
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 330 pages of information about Artificial Light.

During the war, when dastardly traitors and agents of the enemy were striking at industry, the value of lighting was further recognized by the industries, with the result that flood-lighting was installed to protect them.  By common consent this new phase was termed “protective lighting.”  Soon after the entrance of this country into the recent war, the U. S. Military Intelligence established a Section of Plant Protection which had thirty-three district offices during the war and gave attention to thirty-five thousand industrial plants engaged in production of war materials.  Protective lighting was early recognized by this section as a very potential agency for defense, and extensive use was made of it.  For example, Edmund Leigh, chief of the section, in discussing the value of outdoor lighting stated: 

An illustration of our work in this connection is the case of an $80,000,000 powder plant of recent construction.  We arranged to have all wires buried.  In addition to the ordinary lighting on an adjacent hill there is a large searchlight which will command any part of the buildings and grounds.  Every three hundred yards there is a watch-tower with a searchlight on top.  These searchlights are for use only in emergency.  Each tower has a telephone service, one connected with the other.  The men in the towers have a view of the building exteriors, which are all well lighted, and the men in the buildings look across the yard to the lighted fence line and so get a silhouette of persons or objects in between.  The most vital parts of the buildings are surrounded by three fences.  In the near-by woods the underbrush has been cleared out and destroyed.  The trunks and limbs of trees have been whitewashed.  No one can walk among these trees or between the trees and the plant without being seen in silhouette....  I say flatly that I know nothing that is so potential for good defense as good illumination and at the same time so little understood.

Without such protective lighting an army of men would have been required to insure the safety of this one vital plant; still it is obvious that the cost of the protective lighting was an insignificant part of the value of the plant which it insured against damage and destruction.

The United States participated for nineteen months in the recent war and during that time about 400,000 casualties were suffered by its forces.  This was at the rate of about 250,000 per year, which included casualties in battle, at sea, and from sickness, wounds, and accidents.  Every one has felt the magnitude of this rate of casualties because either his home or that of a friend was blighted by one or more of these tragedies in the nineteen months.  However, R. E. Simpson of the Travelers Insurance Company has stated that: 

     During a one-year period in this country the number of
     accidents due to inadequate or improper lighting exceeds the
     yearly rate of our war casualties.

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Project Gutenberg
Artificial Light from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.