Classification of types of street lamps 19 20 century. History of street lamps

Street lighting is what people have needed since ancient times. Human settlements surrounded by virgin forests attracted the attention of predators, who often ran into the streets, yes, and dashing people played pranks in the dark, so it was dangerous to leave the houses at night.

What made people light up the streets primitively - with bonfires, wood-burning lamps, torches. As civilization and urbanization grew, the issue of street lighting became more and more acute. With the invention of candles, street lamps appeared with candles inside or oil wicks, such devices gave very little light and the light was rather dim.
In Paris in the 16th century, the issue of street lighting was simply solved, they were forced to put lamps on the windows facing the street in order to somehow illuminate the streets. That also gave a very weak effect. But in 1417, the mayor of London also tried to solve the problems with lighting by ordering oil lamps to be hung in the streets. After the invention of kerosene, lanterns began to give light brighter, but still quite dim. In 1807, William Murdoch in England invented a revolutionary method for that time - a gas lamp, which began to illuminate the streets of London.
In Russia in 1706 on one of the holidays. In St. Petersburg, by decree of Peter I, it was ordered to hang lanterns on the facades of houses on the Petrograd side. The townspeople of the capital liked this innovation and lanterns began to be hung on the facades throughout the city. The beginning of street lighting in Russia can be considered 1706.
And also by decree of Peter 1 in St. Petersburg they began to install night lights according to the Dutch model. Simple, without architectural frills, a glazed lamp was mounted on a wooden stand, just as simple in maintenance, there was a door inside the lantern, there was an oil lamp. They gave little light, but indicated the direction. Initially, the police department was engaged in lanterns.
Both architects and engineers took up the design of street lamps. In 1730, the architect Leblon developed a project of street lamps for the capital. It is fundamentally different from simple Dutch lamps. A round lantern was attached to a wooden pole, painted in blue and white stripes, on a metal rod, which could be lowered and raised. Hemp oil burned in the lantern. First, such lanterns appeared at the palace of Peter I on the embankment, and then gradually all over the city. Together with the lanterns, the profession of a lamplighter appeared, a person who had to watch the lanterns: clean them, light them in the evening, and extinguish them in the morning, add oil (freeing the policemen from this occupation).
With the advent of gas lamps, the quality of lighting has improved significantly. In the 19th century, gas lanterns quickly came into use in all European countries, starting with the capitals, Paris, Berlin, etc. In Russia, in St. Petersburg, the first gas lanterns appeared in 1819, also quite soon, in Moscow in the 50s. Such lanterns were used in the cities of Russia even before 1930. Luminous gas for lanterns was obtained by dry distillation of hard and brown coal, peat or wood.
The composition of the lighting gas includes:
carbon monoxide,
methane,
hydrogen.
Dry distillation occurs in the following way: coal is loaded into a closed container and heated to a temperature of 500-600 degrees without air access, as a result of which coal begins to decompose into volatile mixtures (gases) and solid residue (coke). This process is called pyrolysis. These gases form the light gas. Luminous gas is also called blue gas after the inventor Blau, a German engineer. In 1913, the Dutch engineer Heike invented gas liquefaction technology, for which he received the Nobel Prize.
Gas at low temperatures and under high pressure turns into a liquid state.
Inside the buildings they made storages for lighting gas, with the outlet of pipes blocked by valves into the outer wall, from where, through rubberized tubes, the lamplighters drew it into retorts and filled the lanterns with it.
The architect Auguste Montferan developed a project for gas-powered street lamps.
Due to the great need for lighting gas in cities, gas plants began to be built and gas holders became their obligatory accessory - large-diameter brick towers (diameter about 40 m, height about 20 m). In some cities, they have survived to this day as monuments of industrial architecture.
From the gas tank, the gas was distributed through cast-iron pipes, an underground gas pipeline, and then connected to the lanterns, and in the lantern it was distributed through smaller metal tubes. And in the same way, the lamplighter in the evening, lit the gas in the lanterns, and extinguished it in the morning.
In 1876, Pavel Yablochkov invented the electric light bulb. And already in 1878 in Kronstadt (on the territory of the naval base, where various innovations were tested and not far from the capital), the first electric street lights started working, and soon the squares near the St. Petersburg theaters were also lit up with electric light. In Moscow, electric lighting appeared for the first time around the square near the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1880. With the invention of electric lighting, the profession of a lamplighter also disappeared. Lanterns were already lit automatically, and a separate department monitored their condition.
In 1880, Thomas Edison invented and patented his electric light bulb. Thanks to the commercial streak characteristic of the Americans, he quickly developed an enterprise for their production and import around the world.
Initially, electricity for lamps was generated by small generators, but with the development of electrification, electrical substations began to be built.
This is how the history of the street lamp developed. And its development has not yet stopped. Ahead - new types of street lighting are not yet known to us.

People made an attempt to illuminate the streets as early as the beginning of the 15th century. London Mayor Henry Barton was the first to initiate this initiative. By his order, lanterns appeared on the streets of the British capital in winter, helping to navigate in the impenetrable darkness.

Some time later, the French also made an attempt to light the city streets. At the beginning of the 16th century, residents were obliged to put lighting lamps on the windows to illuminate the streets of Paris. In 1667, Louis XIV issued a decree on street lighting. As a result, the streets of Paris were lit up with many lanterns, and the reign of Louis XIV was called brilliant.

The first street lamps 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 still this was 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 a lot of 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 to hang lanterns 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 at 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, the American Thomas Edison introduced a light bulb that provided better illumination and was inexpensive to produce. Undoubtedly, this invention replaced gas lamps from city streets.

The bonfire and torch, which has a history of 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 combustible 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 keep 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 ones. With the development of industry and the growth of cities, the need arose for lighting. 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, the townspeople began to hang lanterns, the light source in which was a wick dipped in oil. Paris was the next city to adopt a primitive urban lighting system: residents were required to put oil or candle lamps on windows facing the street. Later, by decree of King Louis XIV, the first street lamps 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 middle of the 19th century.

Lanterns filled with hemp oil began to appear on the streets of St. Petersburg since 1707. After 23 years, urban 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 gave brighter light, and then by gas. London is the first city where gas lighting became part of the urban infrastructure as early as the beginning of the 19th century. The invention of electricity and incandescent lamps completely changed the face of cities, lanterns ceased to exist and appeared everywhere due to the availability, durability and safety of electricity. The first street to receive electric lights in Moscow was Tverskaya.

In the Art Nouveau era, the widespread use of electricity made a real revolution in lighting. The breakthrough was associated with the ability to turn the light source and direct it not up, as it was in all previous years, but down, while improving the illumination of the space.

Despite the fact that 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 speaking of street lamps, we present traditional four- or six-sided lamps, narrowed at the bottom and mounted on a pole or bracket. Lamps, as a rule, were not divided into street and interior ones.

Decor elements were characteristic of all lamps according to the style prevailing in a given period of time.

In our salon you can buy antique chandeliers, made in the late 19th and mid-20th centuries in various styles - this is an actual classic that will be appropriate in a museum, in a city apartment, and in the country.

"Have you heard the story about the old street lamp? It's not really that amusing, but it doesn't interfere with listening to it once. So, there was a kind of respectable old street lamp; he honestly served for many, many years and finally had to retire .
Last evening, a lantern hung on its pole, illuminating the street, and in his soul he felt like an old ballerina who performs on stage for the last time and knows that tomorrow she will be forgotten by everyone in her closet ... "
Hans Christian Andersen. "Old street lamp".

Elements of the urban landscape, which by chance passed through time, are monuments of a bygone era. They were forgotten, which helped them outlive their brethren. Have the old lanterns been preserved in our city? It turns out that yes, and quite a few - both the usual typical ones, characteristic of the era of the sixties and seventies, and non-standard decorative ones. It makes no sense to look for them on busy streets, but when you go into the yards, they are standing, and many even perform their functions regularly.
Here are the "working pensioners" of the early Brezhnev era:

SPPR-125 prismatic mercury pendant lamp with a diffuse reflector and a prismatic open refractor. The most common street lamp of the late 1960s and 1970s with a DRL-125 lamp (arc mercury lamp), or, as they were more fully called, high-pressure discharge lamps - arc mercury lamps with a phosphor (white glow). The lamp was ignited using a choke, which was located in the upper cylindrical structure of the lantern. The luminaire is mounted on a support with a concrete console.

The outdoor mercury lamp SPOR-250 was designed for the use of four-electrode lamps DRL-250.
These lanterns were found on the streets of Bogomolov (at the intersection with Gagarin) and Komintern (in the courtyard behind the Zarya store). The same pillars with concrete consoles are in the yards on the street. Karl Marx, Tereshkova, Grabin, etc. Drummer, but instead of old lamps they use modern ones:

A little about the pillars of this type. "Gusaki" - typical reinforced concrete lampposts with a characteristic concrete top, which were equipped with new buildings in Moscow and the Moscow region in the 60-70s. In those days, they still cared not only about technology, but also about aesthetics (albeit somewhat peculiar). Therefore, in most cases, a hidden (underground) supply of wires and modest but pretty lamps with incandescent lamps of the SPO (SPP)-200 type were provided. The renewed city was conceived with the carefully lit, albeit poor, light of "Ilyich's bulbs".
However, already at the end of the 70s, the party ordered to save electricity, due to which most of the "ganders" were simply abandoned. The other part was mercilessly uprooted and replaced with more modern, but faceless 8-meter supports with mercury lamps SPPR-125. And finally, the third, smallest part found its intended use: they were equipped with SPPR lamps and an air supply of wires. In this form, all this survived somewhere until the end of the 90s.
Here began the third stage of the extermination of "geese": apparently, reinforced concrete brackets were ordered to be considered dilapidated because of their age. At the moment, most of the pillars have lost their recognizable elegant peaks, and pipe sections are screwed to them with improvised means for attaching modern lamps.
Nowadays, any concrete supports have already been recognized as unreliable and dangerous, as a result of which their mass demolition and replacement with analogues made of "can iron" began, most often with dim "smoldering" lamps of the DNAT-70 type and connected with a CIP wire. This is how the era of Soviet "gusakov" ends ingloriously before our eyes.

"Gusak" at DK them. M.I. Kalinin. Mid 1960s:

But some fifty years ago they were at the center of city events. Double "geese" at the cinema "Star". Mid 1960s:

Yards on st. Gorky. Luminaire SPPR-125 on a pole with a console in the form of a single pipe:

and double:

The building of the city hospital No. 2, built in 1932, together with the adjacent territory, turned out to be rich in finds. Here, for example, is a bracket for a pendant lamp. Traces of wiring fastening are clearly visible on the wall. The bracket was discovered by local historian E. Rybak eryback (see the album "Lanterns-flashlights" on Yandex photos: http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/eryback/album/161559/).

Not far from here, at the intersection of St. Dzerzhinsky and etc. Makarenko, a rare pillar of the 1950s or 1960s rises:

On the bracket is the no less rare "SPO-200 hanging open lamp", and in a simple way "hat", - the most common lantern50s of the twentieth century with an ordinary 150-200 W incandescent lamp. This lamp illuminatedbizarre yellowish light llook for a small piece of land under you.

The same "hat" on a wooden pole near the hospital building. Both of them are non-working:

And next to it is a lamp with a reflector resembling an inverted trough, of a brand unknown to me:

In the suburban area of ​​the city on the street. Dobrolyubov and Kutuzov, at least three "hats" have been perfectly preserved. One of them not only hangs on the original old bracket, but also works! Rarity is incredible. Her place is clearly not here, but in the museum:

The modern Lermontov street in Korolyov, figuratively speaking, cuts off the twentieth century from the current century. On the east side rises a new residential quarter "Pionerskaya, 30" with modern street lighting. Along the western one there are seven in a row old lampposts with SPZP-500 lamps:

The lamps, apparently, are non-working, but most of them have preserved glass refracting shades:

Lamps of the same type at the Bolshevo station. 1970-80s:

Kindergarten "Vishenka" (Grabina st., 15) was opened in 1960. Lamps RKU-01-250-011 were installed on the territory approximately from the end of the 1970s:

On the territory of the Teremok kindergarten (3a Udarnika Ave., opened in 1956), the lamps are the same, but the poles, it is quite likely, are the same age as the buildings:

In the 1980s, quite famous andrecognizable street lampwas "Ambassador Elektrosvit" (Czechoslovakia) type 444 23 17. In the USSR, he received the nickname "humpback", and in the Czech Republic he is still called "camel" (velbloud). Perhaps the only copy in the city has been preserved on the territory of the kindergarten "Mosaic" (Gagarin St., 22):

A small abandoned lantern in the park on the street. The Comintern, apparently, has also been standing there since the 1980s:

Festive illumination of the 1980s (1990s?) on Sovetskaya Street in the md. Pervomaisky:

At house number 17 on Grabina Street, two artistically decorated wall lamps have been preserved above the window. Once upon a time they had glass shades:

An unsightly old lamp above the window of City Hospital No. 2:

And finally - miraculously preserved decorative metal lanterns. On old photos of the 40s - 60s. 20th century it is noticeable that there were many such lanterns in the city:

In those that have survived to this day, there are no lamps for a long time, there are only poles. Since the lanterns are not typical, it is more difficult to determine their age.
Three identical lanterns are located around the building built in the late 1950s - early 1960s (Lenin St., 4):

However, here is an archival photo taken on the street. Gagarin and dated 1945. To the right, in the distance, is the building of city baths, there are still no five-story buildings at all:

Isn't it true, exactly the same lanterns?!

Before the war, on one of the main streets of Kaliningrad - Stalin (now it is Tsiolkovsky Street) - there were only two five-story stone houses No. 23/11 and No. 25 (built in 1940). Since the beginning of the 1950s, the street and the neighborhoods adjacent to it from the south began to be built up with five-story houses. At the same time, a kindergarten (1952), a secondary school (1953) and a three-story clinic were built.

In the 1960s, a hospital campus was built near the clinic. Later, all these medical institutions became part of the Central City Hospital No. 1.

An old alley leads from the clinic at a right angle to Tsiolkovsky Street through the hospital park. Around the building and along the alley among the thickets, four decorative lanterns of the type described above have been preserved. The fifth hides in the northwestern corner of the park on another, diagonal alley, which also once connected the polyclinic with Tsiolkovsky Street, and now rests against the fence. There are no other such lamps on the territory of the hospital. With a high degree of probability, we can say that they were installed in the 1950s.

The fact that lanterns of this type were very common in the then Kaliningrad is also evidenced by the fact that another of their "brothers" still stands in the very center of the city - on Tereshkova Street, across the street from the Central Palace of Culture. M.I. Kalinin. Most likely, it is older than the DK building. Perhaps this lamppost has survived to this day also because it perfectly disguises itself as the surrounding vegetation. I passed by countless times without seeing it point-blank, and I recently discovered it only because I carefully searched:

In July 2014, the vegetation was thinned out, and the lamppost appeared in all its glory:

Another decorative lantern stands near the checkpoint of RSC Energia, slightly discordant with the surrounding space. I can’t determine its age:

Lanterns with a decorative element in the form of a harp are located on the territory of the former kindergarten (Gagarin St., 14a):

The first information concerning the issue of artificial lighting of city streets dates back to the beginning of the 15th century. To cope with the impenetrable darkness in the capital of Great Britain, in 1417, London Mayor Henry Barton issued an order regarding the need to hang lanterns on the streets on winter evenings. The first street lamps, of course, were more than primitive and simple, because they used the most ordinary candles and oil. At the beginning of the 16th century, the French adopted the experience of the British and the inhabitants of Paris were also required to keep lamps at the windows overlooking the street. Under King Louis XIV, numerous lights from street lamps began to appear in Paris. And by 1667, the king issued a decree concerning street lighting, thanks to which Louis was called "brilliant".

As for Russia, the first mention of street lighting appeared under Peter I. In honor of the outstanding victory over the Swedes, in 1706 Peter I ordered that lanterns be hung on all the facades of houses near the Peter and Paul Fortress. The tsar and the townspeople liked this event, and the lanterns began to be lit more and more often - on various holidays, and thus this gave rise to street lighting for the city as such. Later, in 1718, stationary lamps began to be constantly used on the streets of St. Petersburg, and already 12 years later, Empress Anna ordered their installation in Moscow.

The design of the first outdoor oil lamp belongs to Jean-Baptiste Leblon, who was a talented architect and “a skilled technician of many different arts. Leblon had great authority in France." In the autumn of 1720, the first pendant lamps, which were made according to his drawings at the Yamburg glass factory, were lit on the Neva embankment near the Petrovsky Winter Palace. The lanterns were of the following design: on wooden poles, which had white and blue stripes, there were glazed lamps on metal rods. Hemp oil was burned in them. It is from this, one can assume, that regular street lighting appeared in Russia.

Later, street lighting technology gradually developed both in Russia and abroad. It was possible to significantly improve the brightness of lighting thanks to the use of kerosene, but the real revolution in street lighting was marked by the appearance of the first gas lamps in the 19th century. The inventor of gas lighting, Englishman William Murdoch, has long been criticized and even ridiculed. The famous writer Walter Scott once noted in a letter to one of his friends, “some madman recently suggested lighting London with smoke.” Nevertheless, despite the prejudice against him, Murdoch was more than successfully able to demonstrate in practice all the many advantages of gas lighting. In 1807, Pell Mell became the first street where the new design of lanterns was installed. Pretty soon, gas lamps conquered all European capitals.

As for electric lighting, its origin is most directly connected with the names of the famous Russian inventor Alexander Lodygin and the American Thomas Edison. So, in 1873, Lodygin developed the original design of a carbon incandescent lamp, for which he received the Lomonosov Prize from the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In the near future, such lamps began to be used to illuminate the St. Petersburg Admiralty (the lamps were installed in special copper lamps made in the old style). A few years later, Edison came up with an improved light bulb that produced brighter light and was much cheaper to manufacture. With the advent of such an electric light bulb, gas lamps soon completely fell into disuse, giving way to more modern and reliable electric lighting.