Rage, rage against the dying of the lightbulb

When I was young, all the traffic lights in central London had black iron flambeaux, about the size of your forearm, at the top of each pole. I doubt many people even noticed the decoration consciously, but it lent a faintly monumental touch to otherwise utilitarian ironwork – like those magnificent bronze fish wrapped around the streetlights along the Thames Embankment. In however small a way the flambeaux gave our metropolis the air of an imperial city. Ornamentation in the stone of buildings or the steel of street furniture does this: because, and precisely because, it serves no purpose but to beautify or dignify. Because it is (strictly speaking) useless and extravagant, it elevates the scene. It says ‘here dwell a race of men with the time, money and confidence to gild functionality with a little ornamentation. Here lives a civilised people.’

At some point in the 1970s the flambeaux began to vanish. Whether the Greater London Council went around sawing them off, or they were not replaced and so disappeared slowly by natural wastage, I do not know. Does it matter? Hardly, you might say. I don’t remember the change becoming a matter of controversy. I don’t remember anyone even mentioning it. One day — and nobody will know the date — the last flambeau was carted away; and London’s streets were imperceptibly yet (to my mind) signally diminished.

Would I have written a column about it, had I been a columnist then? Perhaps not. People might have called that trivial. We had the USSR, the Vietnam war, many economic woes, strikes, and finally the winter of discontent to worry about. Yet there are things that happen, changes that occur around us, which do impoverish our lives in small but quite significant ways, the loss never quite rising to the level where serious public commentary is thought fitting. We reserve the public commentary for things we can hardly alter, deeming those we can to be beneath our notice.

I have a modern example in mind: one that has been irking me for years. It is the onward creep of fluorescent lighting in homes, restaurants and hotels. For reasons of energy-efficiency that I do not dismiss, incandescent lighting (the tungsten bulbs, 40, 60 or 100 watt, of the 20th century) is being regulated out of existence. In its place, in comes fluorescent lighting: glass tubes, straight or coiled within bulb-like containers, containing a gas that glows bright white when a current is passed through it. For your buck this gives you more light, and less heat, than the old bulbs.

My late father having been an electrical engineer and a missionary for the modern wonders of electricity (he despised gas), I became an early enthusiast for fluorescent lights. In the 1970s when long, straight, ugly tubes began to be supplemented by more compact lamps, I replaced all the tungsten lights in the flat I’d bought in Clapham with the new fittings. When from the late 1980s even more compact and efficient fluorescent lamps were coming on to the market, I bought scores (they were very expensive then) and fitted them wherever I could. Politicians, and the environmental cause they now all champion, did not lead but followed me in this, nearly a decade later.

So I ought to approve. But for nearly 40 years I’ve had to suppress a quiet but insistent internal doubt. I don’t like the new lighting. I don’t like the quality of illumination it gives. This isn’t a matter of intensity but of tone. The tone is unkind, flat, harsh.

For years I told myself that my discomfort arose only from the unfamiliarity of the new. ‘No doubt,’ I reflected, ‘the same objections were made when gas or Tilley (pressurised paraffin) lighting came in. People will have moaned that candles and oil lamps were softer and more intimate. Then when Mr Edison and Mr Swan invented incandescent bulbs, people will have complained that they missed the soft hiss of paraffin or gas. People always complain. In time,’ I said to myself, ‘you won’t miss the tungsten bulbs; and wouldn’t want to return to them.’

But that was 1975. And this is 2011. And I still don’t like fluorescent lights. I’m still consigning spent tungsten bulbs to the bin, but replacing them with energy-saving alternatives with an increasingly heavy heart. In fact, in Derbyshire, we’ve gone back to using more candles in the sitting and dining rooms, even sometimes the kitchen, when we can’t bear the dead glare of fluorescent lights. Smart modern hotel rooms hold a particular horror for me; having every commercial reason to save on electricity, hotels have been ahead of private householders in making the switch, and I now associate the irritating hum of a noisy ventilation system, an overheated room and a window you can’t open with the strangely grey-white illumination of low-energy bedside lamps.

I wonder — ignore me if I’m being pretentious here — whether it is because until recently (and ever since we had furry faces and lived in caves), Homo sapiens has lit the night with flames, and the yellow-orange light of combustion is replicated better by incandescent than fluorescent bulbs, that we now hanker after the millennia of fireside light buried deep in our collective unconscious? Perhaps we associate yellower light with warmth and safety as well as illumination; and the whiter light of the moon with danger?

Whatever the reason, I may join those many of my countrymen who buy up and hoard tungsten bulbs. If China really is building a new coal-fired power station every time the clock strikes, why, for the sake of saving a pinch of coal dust, spoil what evenings at home remain for us?