In 1729 certain individuals contracted to light the streets of London by taxing the residents and paid the city for this monopoly.  Householders were permitted to hang out a lantern or a candle or to pay the company for doing so.  But robberies increased so rapidly that in 1736 the Lord Mayor and Common Council petitioned Parliament to erect lamps for lighting the city.  An act was passed accordingly, giving them the privilege to erect lamps where they saw fit and to burn them from sunset to sunrise.  A charge was made to the residents, on a sliding scale depending upon the rate of rental of the houses.  As a consequence five thousand lamps were soon installed.  In 1738 there were fifteen thousand street lamps in London and they were burned an average of five thousand hours annually.

In the annals of these early times street-lighting is almost invariably the result of an attempt to reduce the number of robberies and other crimes.  In appealing for more street-lamps in 1744 the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London in a petition to the king, stated

that divers confederacies of great numbers of evil-disposed persons, armed with bludgeons, pistols, cutlasses, and other dangerous weapons, infest not only the private lanes and passages, but likewise the public streets and places of public concourse, and commit most daring outrages upon the persons of your Majesty’s good subjects, whose affairs oblige them to pass through the streets, by terrifying, robbing and wounding them; and these facts are frequently perpetrated at such times as were heretofore deemed hours of security.

It has already been seen that gas-lighting was introduced in the streets of London for the first time in 1807.  This marks the real beginning of public-service lighting companies.  In the next decade interest in street-lighting by means of gas was awakened on the Continent, and it was not long before this new phase of civilization was well under way.  Although this first gas-lighting was done by the use of open flames, it was a great improvement over all the preceding efforts.  Lawlessness did not disappear entirely, of course, and perhaps it never will, but it skulked in the back streets.  A controlling influence had now appeared.

But early innovations in lighting did not escape criticism and opposition.  In fact, innovations to-day are not always received by unanimous consent.  There were many in those early days who felt that what was good for them should be good enough for the younger generation.  The descendants of these opponents are present to-day but fortunately in diminishing numbers.  It has been shown that in Philadelphia in 1833 a proposal to install a gas-plant was met with a protest signed by many prominent citizens.  A few paragraphs of an article entitled “Arguments against Light” which appeared in the Cologne Zeitung in 1816 indicate the character of the objections raised against street-lighting.