Electric Lighting Quotes

There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.

In 1891, during the Presidency of William Henry Harrison [Benjamin Harrison], electric lights were first installed in the White House, the residence of the leaders of our country. At that time, commercial electricity was not economically feasible, but President Harrison wanted to affirm his confidence in the technological capability of our country.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

I have always consistently opposed high-tension and alternating systems of electric lighting...not only on account of danger, but because of their general unreliability and unsuitability for any general system of distribution.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

23 other inventors created electric incandescent light bulbs prior to Thomas Edison. Edison is renowned primarily because he was the first to figure out the business model of electric lighting. Simultaneous independent invention is the norm, true for minor as well as major leaps like calculus, steam engines and the transistor. […] If Alexander Graham Bell had not secured the patent for inventing the telephone, Elisha Gray would have gotten it because they both applied for the telephone patent on the same day (Feb 14, 1876).

It is high time that we had lights that are not incendiary torches.

I always loved bulbs, and I use light a lot in my shows. In my office in Paris, I have 300 bulbs.