Author: Sandy Isenstadt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026203817X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
How electric light created new spaces that transformed the built environment and the perception of modern architecture. In this book, Sandy Isenstadt examines electric light as a form of architecture—as a new, uniquely modern kind of building material. Electric light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a streetscape; it brought with it new ways of perceiving and experiencing space itself. If modernity can be characterized by rapid, incessant change, and modernism as the creative response to such change, Isenstadt argues, then electricity—instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent—is modernity's medium. Isenstadt shows how the introduction of electric lighting at the end of the nineteenth century created new architectural spaces that altered and sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. He constructs an architectural history of these new spaces through five examples, ranging from the tangible miracle of the light switch to the immaterial and borderless gloom of the wartime blackout. He describes what it means when an ordinary person can play God by flipping a switch; when the roving cone of automobile headlights places driver and passenger at the vertex of a luminous cavity; when lighting in factories is seen to enhance productivity; when Times Square became an emblem of illuminated commercial speech; and when the absence of electric light in a blackout produced a new type of space. In this book, the first sustained examination of the spatial effects of electric lighting, Isenstadt reconceives modernism in architecture to account for the new perceptual conditions and visual habits that followed widespread electrification.
Author: Robert Friedel
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801899443
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
In September 1878, Thomas Alva Edison brashly—and prematurely—proclaimed his breakthrough invention of a workable electric light. That announcement was followed by many months of intense experimentation that led to the successful completion of his Pearl Street station four years later. Edison was not alone—nor was he first—in developing an incandescent light bulb, but his was the most successful of all competing inventions. Drawing from the documents in the Edison archives, Robert Friedel and Paul Israel explain how this came to be. They explore the process of invention through the Menlo Park notes, discussing the full range of experiments, including the testing of a host of materials, the development of such crucial tools as the world's best vacuum pump, and the construction of the first large-scale electrical generators and power distribution systems. The result is a fascinating story of excitement, risk, and competition. Revised and updated from the original 1986 edition, this definitive study of the most famous invention of America's most famous inventor is completely keyed to the printed and electronic versions of the Edison Papers, inviting the reader to explore further the remarkable original sources.
Author: Ernest Freeberg
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143124447
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
A sweeping history of the electric light revolution and the birth of modern America The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it and capturing the wonder Edison’s invention inspired. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility in which the greater forces of progress and change are made by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.
Author: Electric Light
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
Author: Brian Bowers
Publisher: Peter Peregrinus Limited
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Author: Lewis Howard Latimer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electric lighting, Incandescent
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
Author: Chris Oxlade
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1432948806
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34
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Book Description
Traces the history of artificial lighting and the invention of the light bulb.
Author: Boone Electric Light Company
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electric lighting, Incandescent
Languages : en
Pages : 26
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Book Description
Author: John R. Matthews
Publisher: Franklin Watts
ISBN: 9780531123348
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
Describes the light sources that people used throughout history until Thomas Edison revolutionized the world with the electric light bulb.
Author: Julius Maier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
