Location Taken: North Sydney, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012
Have you ever stopped to think how miraculous lamps and other modern lights are?
With just the flick of a switch, we turn night into day!
I know, I know, most of you are going “So?” right now. But that’s because you haven’t really thought about it.
For millennia, all we humans had to see what was around us at night were the moon, the stars, and fires. The moon is a fickle light, fading in and out as the month passes. The stars are glorious, but not exactly the best for illumination. And fire, well, that’s a different miracle. One that requires a lot of maintenance and carries a lot of danger with it.
Electric lights, however, those are a very different thing. Sure, they have the downside of needing a power source, but with batteries, they’re still far more portable than even the best torch. Imagine you’re traveling in the woods with a torch looking for a lost child, and you find her up in a tree, too afraid to come down herself. What do you do with the torch while you climb up to get her? You definitely can’t carry it and climb. Setting it on the ground or leaning it against a tree might set the woods on fire. If you’re lucky, there’s a patch of bare ground nearby, but how often do you see bare ground in a forest? Perhaps you could stick it upright in the ground, but that’s a difficult thing to manage when one end is made of burning hotness. The best option is to bring someone else with you from the start, to either hold the torch or climb up in your place. A flashlight, on the other hand, you can drop at a moments notice, and easily position to illuminate where you need light the most.
Modern life is built around the electric light. It lets us work and play without caring about position of the sun, lets us browse the internet into the wee hours of the morning, lets us travel around the clock. And it doesn’t cause fires, and needs almost no maintenance. And they can endure harsh conditions. The light in this photo is attached to a ferry, exposed to the weather and salt water all day every day, something no self-respecting fire would ever put up with.
Heck, one of the ways you can tell how powerfully ubiquitous it is is how those who live with it don’t even think of it as anything special.
If you’ve ever had a power outage lasting overnight, you know how few things you can do when there’s no light. You can talk or do other similar things with the people around you, or you can just go to bed.
Or, I suppose, these days you can just pull out your smartphone or tablet and play on that for as long as the battery lasts. That’s got electric lights in it too, mind you. And once that’s gone, well, you can sit and stare into the blackness trying not to think about all the things that could be lurking out there, waiting for you to just close your eyes for a moment…
