The first mention of artificial lighting of city streets can be dated back to the beginning of the 15th century. To dispel the impenetrable darkness in the capital of the British Empire, in 1417, London mayor Henry Barton ordered lanterns to be hung on winter evenings. The first street lamps were primitive, as they used ordinary candles and oil. At the beginning of the 16th century, the French took up the initiative and residents of Paris were required to keep lamps near the windows that faced the street. Under Louis XIV (the Sun King), numerous street lamps appeared in Paris. In 1667, the “Sun King” issued a royal decree on street lighting and thanks to this, Louis was called brilliant.
The first mention of street lighting in Russia appeared during the reign of Peter I. To celebrate the victory over the Swedes, in 1706, Peter I ordered lanterns to be hung on the facades of houses near the Peter and Paul Fortress. In 1718, the first stationary lamps appeared on the streets of St. Petersburg, and 12 years later, Empress Anna ordered their installation in Moscow.
The use of kerosene made it possible to significantly increase the brightness of lighting, but the real revolution in street light was made by the appearance of gas lamps in the 19th century. The inventor of the gas lamp, the Englishman William Murdoch, was subjected to much criticism and ridicule. Walter Scott once wrote to one of his friends, “some madman is proposing to illuminate London with smoke.” Despite the criticism, Murdoch demonstrated the benefits of gas lighting with great success. In 1807, Pell Mell became the first street to have the new design of lamps installed. Soon gas lamps conquered all European capitals.
The history of electric lighting is connected, first of all, with the names of the Russian inventor Alexander Lodygin and the American Thomas Edison. 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 produce. With the advent of the electric light bulb, gas lamps quickly disappeared from city streets, giving way to electric lighting.
Today, modern street lighting is a complex system that provides optical visibility on city streets in the dark. It includes thousands of lamps on masts, supports, and overpasses. They are turned on automatically, using a light relay, in which a photodiode controls a low-voltage circuit, and it turns on the lighting, or manually by a dispatcher.
The bonfire and the torch, whose history goes back about two hundred thousand years, can be considered the first attempt at street lighting.
The prototypes of a street lamp appeared more than two and a half thousand years ago in Ancient Greece, where bowls filled with a flammable substance, mainly oil, were installed on tripods to illuminate the streets. Around the same time, the first sky lanterns appeared in China - lightweight structures made of rice paper stretched over a wooden or bamboo frame. A miniature burner is fixed inside the flashlight, the burning time of which is no more than 15-20 minutes. In ancient Rome, in addition to torches, oil lanterns made of bronze began to be used. Such lanterns were either portable - they were carried by slaves, illuminating the path of their master, or they were installed in special holders on the walls, both indoors and outdoors. To prevent the flame from going out in the wind, the walls of the lantern were covered with oiled cloth, bull bladder or bone plates.
Medieval Europe did not know such a thing as street lighting. The townspeople still used portable lanterns or lamps, mostly oil lamps. With the development of industry and the growth of cities, the need for lighting arose. London became the pioneer of urban lighting, where the first street lamps appeared at the beginning of the 15th century: by order of the mayor of the city in 1417, citizens began to hang lanterns, the light source of which was a wick dipped in oil. Paris was the next city to adopt a primitive system of urban lighting: residents were required to display oil or candle lamps on their windows facing the street. Later, by order of King Louis XIV, the first street lights appeared in the city. A systematic approach to urban lighting was first taken in Amsterdam, where lanterns were installed in 1669, the design of which remained unchanged until the mid-19th century.
Lanterns fueled with hemp oil began to appear on the streets of St. Petersburg in 1707. 23 years later, city lighting reached Moscow: glass lanterns were hung on wooden poles located at an equal distance from each other. Oil was first replaced by kerosene, which was cheaper and provided brighter light, and then by gas. London is the first city where gas lighting became part of the urban infrastructure at the beginning of the 19th century. The invention of electricity and incandescent lamps finally changed the appearance of cities, streetlights ceased to exist and appeared everywhere thanks to the availability, durability and safety of electricity. The first street to receive electric lights in Moscow was Tverskaya.
In the Art Nouveau era, electricity became widespread and made a real revolution in lighting. The breakthrough was associated with the ability to turn the light source over and direct it not upward, as was the case in all previous years, but downward, while improving the illumination of the space.
Although the light source has changed over the centuries, the appearance of the street lamp has undergone minimal changes. Of course, new technologies allow you to experiment with both materials and design, but when we talk about street lamps, we imagine traditional four- or hexagonal lamps, narrowed at the bottom and mounted on a pole or bracket. Lamps, as a rule, were not divided into street and interior.
Decorative elements were characteristic of all lamps according to the style dominant in a given period of time.
In our showroom you can buy antique chandeliers made in the late 19th to mid-20th centuries in various styles - these are current classics that would be appropriate in a museum, in a city apartment, or in a country house.
History of street lamps The very first street lamps appeared at the beginning of the 15th century. By order of the mayor of London, Henry Barton, street lamps began to be hung in 1417. At the beginning of the 16th century, residents of Paris were required to keep lamps near windows that faced the street. At first, the lanterns provided relatively little light, since they used ordinary candles and oil. The use of kerosene made it possible to significantly increase the brightness of lighting. Gas lamps appeared at the beginning of the 19th century. Their inventor was the Englishman William Murdoch. In 1807, lanterns of a new design were installed on Pall Mall and soon conquered all European capitals. London 1417 Paris kerosene 1807
Street lamps in Russia In Russia, street lamps appeared under Peter I in 1706 in St. Petersburg on the facades of some houses near the Peter and Paul Fortress. The first stationary lamps appeared on the streets of St. Petersburg in 1718. Street lamps appeared in Moscow in 1730 by decree of Empress Anna Ioanovna. Instead of candles, they lit hemp oil with a wick. Oil lamps reigned supreme in Moscow for almost 150 years. Moscow 1730 The first electric street lamps in Moscow appeared in 1880. The unusual orange light of imported console lamps with high-pressure sodium lamps, which were installed in Moscow in 1975 on Okhotny Ryad and Lubyanka, became the hallmark of the city for a long time. Moscow 1880 Moscow 1975 Okhotny Ryad Lubyanka
The first street lamps burning with hemp oil appeared in St. Petersburg in 1718 and were intended to illuminate the surroundings of the Winter Palace and the Main Admiralty. Their project was developed by the architect J. B. A. Leblon. At the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries. The St. Petersburg oil lantern was a 4-sided (less often spherical) lamp, which was mounted on a wooden pole, painted with white and blue stripes. In 1777, there were about 2,300 oil lanterns in the city, around the beginning of the 19th century. Granite stands began to be used as supports for such lamps, and from the 1820s. - cast iron pillars (cast according to the drawings of engineer P. P. Bazin).
Let's look into history. The weak light of oil lanterns could not satisfy the needs for O.U.; there was a need for a more powerful light source. In the summer of 1819, the first experimental gas holder was installed in the church on Aptekarsky Island, and in the fall the first gas lamps were lit. In 1835, the St. Petersburg Gas Lighting Society was established, which had a monopoly on the industrial production and sale of gas. The construction of a gas plant in the area of the Obvodny Canal made it possible in 1839 to illuminate Palace Square, Nevsky Prospekt and a number of adjacent streets with the help of gas lamps. Gas lamps (6- and 8-sided) were fastened with screws to cast iron posts. In the 1860s. development of O. u. in St. Petersburg is associated mainly with the activities of the Capital Lighting Society, created in 1858, and, to a lesser extent, the French Joint Stock Company. Gas lamps were installed only in the central part of the city; the outskirts and small streets were illuminated by old oil lamps and alcohol-turpentine lamps, which appeared in In 1863, kerosene street lamps first lit up in St. Petersburg, replacing them by the end of the 1860s. oil and alcohol.
Let's look into history Experiments on electric street lighting in St. Petersburg have been carried out since the early 1870s. The first electric lamps (with carbon incandescent lamps designed by A. N. Lodygin) were lit in July 1873 on Odesskaya Street, in Peski. Lanterns with candles by P. N. Yablochkov were installed to illuminate the Liteyny Bridge. In 1883, the Elektrotechnik society built on a wooden barge on the river. The car wash near the Police (now Narodny) Bridge was a power plant, which on December 30, 1883 provided current to 32 electric lamps that illuminated Nevsky Prospekt from Bolshaya Morskaya Street (now Herzen Street) to Anichkov Bridge. In August 1884, electric lights also came on in the streets adjacent to Nevsky Prospekt. In 1886, the Joint Stock Company for Electric Lighting was established in St. Petersburg. The construction of three alternating current power stations (see Electricity supply) made it possible to illuminate all the main streets of the city with electric lamps. By 1915, there were about 3 thousand electric street lamps in St. Petersburg, located mainly in the central regions, and over 12.5 thousand gas and kerosene lamps on the outskirts.
Let's look into history By 1927, kerosene lanterns were mainly replaced by electric ones, and by the mid-30s. Gas lighting was also eliminated. Electric lighting has become a special branch of the urban economy. During the pre-war five-year plans () special power supply networks were laid in Leningrad. Since the end of the 50s. The technical re-equipment of outdoor lighting began - gas-discharge light sources replaced incandescent lamps. In the 60s for O. u. Mostly mercury-helium lamps were used, emitting bright but “cold” light. In 1978, the first arc sodium lamps, producing a “warm” yellow light, lit up on Yuri Gagarin Avenue, by the end of the 80s. they illuminated Nevsky Prospekt and part of Moskovsky Prospekt, Vozdukhoplavatnaya Street and other thoroughfares of the city. By 1990, about 160 thousand lamps were installed on the streets and squares of Leningrad. The operation of electrical installations of urban outdoor lighting is carried out by Lensvet management.
Once upon a time there lived a dragon. His name was Komodo. He knew how to spew fire, and therefore all the surrounding residents were afraid of him. Hearing his steps, everyone ran and hid. And it was difficult not to hear his steps, because Komodo wore three pairs of shoes at once - dragons have six legs! - and all six shoes together, and even each shoe individually, creaked terribly. But then one day Komodo met a girl, Susie, who was not at all afraid of him. - Why are you spewing fire? - she asked. - You're scaring everyone! “Well,” answered the dragon, “I... hmm... I don’t know.” Somehow I didn’t think about it. So, don't you need to scare me anymore? “Of course not,” said Susie. “Okay, I won’t,” Komodo promised. They said goodbye and Susie went home. It was already dark, but for some reason lamplighter Charlie did not light the lights, and passers-by did not really know where to go. It turns out that Charlie didn't even get out of bed that day. He was too tired the night before and did not have time to rest properly. He was fast asleep and chewing a sandwich in his sleep. And the mayor of the city, Sir William, was very angry. He didn't know how to light the street lamps. And then Susie came up with a good idea. She ran back to Komodo Cave and led the dragon into the city. The two of them walked all the streets; the dragon spewed fire and lit all the lanterns in a row. The city residents were very happy. Since then, they have completely ceased to be afraid of the dragon. And every year, when the lamplighter Charlie went on vacation, they called Komodo to light lanterns on the streets of the city.
http://www.free-lance.ru/users/abrazosrotosIn 1417, the mayor of London, Henry Barton, ordered lanterns to be hung 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, residents of Paris were required to keep lamps near windows that faced 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 Louis’s reign was called brilliant.
The first street lamps provided relatively little light because they used ordinary candles and oil. The use of kerosene made it possible to significantly increase the brightness of lighting, but the real revolution in street light occurred 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 illuminate London with smoke. Despite such criticisms, Murdoch successfully demonstrated the advantages of gas lighting. In 1807, lanterns of a new design were installed on Pall Mall and soon conquered all European capitals.
St. Petersburg became the first city in Russia where street lights appeared. On December 4, 1706, on the day of celebrating the victory over the Swedes, on the orders 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 on all major 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 Mother See was signed by Empress Anna Ioannovna only in 1730). The design of the first street oil lantern was designed by Jean Baptiste Leblond, an architect and “skilled 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 Peter the Great's Winter Palace. Glass lamps were attached to metal rods on wooden posts with white and blue stripes. Hemp oil burned in them. This is how we got regular street lighting.
In 1723, thanks to the efforts of Chief of Police General Anton Divier, 595 lanterns were lit on the most famous streets of the city. This lighting facility was served by 64 lamplighters. The approach to the matter was scientific. The lanterns were lit from August to April, guided by the “tables of the dark hours” that were sent from the Academy.
St. Petersburg historian I.G. Georgi describes this lighting on the streets as follows: “For this purpose, there are wooden pillars painted blue and white along the streets, each of which on an iron rod supports a spherical lantern, lowered on a block for cleaning and pouring oil...”
St. Petersburg was the first city in Russia and one of the few in Europe where regular street lighting appeared just twenty years after its founding. Oil lanterns turned out to be tenacious - they burned in the city every day for 130 years. Frankly speaking, there was not much light from them. In addition, they tried 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 quickly, as quickly as possible, pass by. It’s even luckier if you get away with him pouring stinking oil all over your smart frock coat.”
Lighting the northern capital was a profitable business, and 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 St. Petersburg lanterns (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 lights shine dimly, sometimes they don’t light up at all, they are turned off ahead of time. There was even an opinion that lamplighters saved their oil for porridge.
For decades, oil was burned in lanterns. Entrepreneurs realized the profitability of lighting and began to look for new ways to generate income. From ser. 18th century Kerosene began to be 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 Aptekarsky Island. Gas lamps appeared, and in 1835 the St. Petersburg Gas Lighting Society was created. Spirit lamps appeared in 1849. The city was divided between 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 a lot of money on gas. But for a long time in the evenings, lamplighters with ladders on their shoulders loomed on the city streets, hastily running from lamppost to lamplight.
A textbook on arithmetic has been published in more than one edition, where the problem was given: “A lamplighter lights lamps 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 lamps located on this street can be lit by a lamplighter in 88 minutes.)
But then the summer of 1873 arrived. An emergency announcement was made in a number of metropolitan newspapers that “on July 11, experiments in electric street lighting will be shown to the public along Odesskaya Street, on Peski.”
Recalling this event, one of its 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 on Peski, they would be shown to the public experiments of electric lighting with Lodygin lamps. I passionately wanted to see this new electric light... Many people walked with us for the same purpose. Soon out of the darkness we found ourselves in some street with bright lighting. In two street lamps, kerosene lamps were replaced by incandescent lamps, which emitted a bright white light.”
A crowd had gathered on a quiet and unattractive Odessa street. Some of those who came took newspapers with them. First, these people approached a kerosene lamp, and then an electric one, and compared the distance at which they could read.
In memory of this event, a memorial plaque was installed at house number 60 on Suvorovsky Avenue.
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 city authorities, Lodygin was unable to establish mass production and widely use them for street lighting.
In 1879, 12 electric lights were lit on the new Liteiny Bridge. “Candles” by P.N. Yablochkov were installed on lamps made according to the design of the architect Ts.A. Kavos. “Russian Light,” as electric lights were dubbed, created a sensation in Europe. Later, these legendary lanterns were moved to the current Ostrovsky Square. In 1880, the first electric lamps began to shine in Moscow. Thus, with the help of arc lamps in 1883, on the day of the Holy Coronation of Alexander III, the area around the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was illuminated.
In the same year, a power plant on the river began operation. Moika near the Police Bridge (Siemens and Halske), and on December 30, 32 electric lights illuminated Nevsky Prospekt from Bolshaya Morskaya Street to Fontanka. A year later, electric lighting appeared on the neighboring streets. In 1886-99, 4 power plants were already operating for lighting needs (the Helios society, the plant of the Belgian society, etc.) and 213 similar lamps were burning. By the beginning of the twentieth century. There were about 200 power plants in St. Petersburg. In the 1910s light bulbs with metal filaments appeared (since 1909 - tungsten lamps). On the eve of the First World War, there were 13,950 street lamps in St. Petersburg (3,020 electric, 2,505 kerosene, 8,425 gas). By 1918, the streets were lit only by electric lights. 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, the city began to pay great attention to the artistic lighting of buildings and structures. Traditionally, masterpieces of architectural art, museums, monuments, and administrative buildings are decorated this way all over the world. St. 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 (formerly Lieutenant Schmidt, and even earlier Nikolaevsky), Alexander Nevsky... The list goes on. The lighting design of historical monuments, created at a high artistic and technical level, gives them a special sound.
Walking along the embankments at night is an unforgettable sight! Citizens and guests of the city can appreciate the soft light and noble design of lamps on the streets and embankments of evening and night St. Petersburg. And the masterly illumination of the bridges will emphasize their lightness and severity and create a feeling of the integrity of this amazing city, located on islands and dotted with rivers and canals.
People made an attempt to illuminate the streets at the beginning of the 15th century. London Mayor Henry Barton was the first to take this initiative. By his order, lanterns appeared on the streets of the British capital in winter to help navigate in the impenetrable darkness.
After some time, the French also made an attempt to illuminate the city streets. At the beginning of the 16th century, to illuminate the streets of Paris, residents were required to install lighting lamps on their windows. In 1667, Louis XIV issued a decree on street lighting. As a result, the streets of Paris were illuminated with many lanterns, and the reign of Louis XIV was called brilliant.
The first street lights in history used candles and oil, so the lighting was dim. Over time, the use of kerosene in them made it possible to slightly increase the brightness, but this was still not enough. At the beginning of the 19th century, gas lamps began to be used, which significantly improved the quality of lighting. The idea to use gas in them belonged to the English inventor William Murdoch. At the time, few people took Murdoch's invention seriously. Some even considered him crazy, but he was able to prove that gas lamps have many advantages. The first gas lamps in history appeared in 1807 on Pall Mall. Soon the capital of almost every European state could boast of the same lighting.
As for Russia, street lighting appeared here thanks to Peter I. In 1706, the emperor, celebrating the victory over the Swedes near Kalisz, ordered lanterns to be hung on the facades of houses around the Peter and Paul Fortress. Twelve years later, lanterns illuminated the streets of St. Petersburg. They were installed on Moscow streets on the initiative of Empress Anna Ioannovna.
A truly incredible event was the invention of electric lighting. The world's first incandescent lamp was created by Russian electrical engineer Alexander Lodygin. For this he was awarded the Lomonosov Prize of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. A few years later, American Thomas Edison introduced a light bulb that provided better illumination and was also inexpensive to produce. Undoubtedly, this invention displaced gas lamps from city streets.
