LAMPLIGHTERS GONE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 745, 19 August 1929, Page 11

LAMPLIGHTERS GONE

MODERN SYSTEM IN NEW YORK STREETS

40,000 LAMPS ALIGHT

The last two gas lamplighters in the city of New" York gloomily surrendered the wand-like implements of their craft a few weeks ago and began the hunt for other jobs, thereby giving electricity a complete monopoly on the illumination of New York streets. This closes the story of an occupation that once kept employed more than 500 men with a union of their own affiliated with the American*Federation of Labour.

There may be an opening for a couple of experienced lamplighters in Paris and London, where gas is still used to brighten the thoroughfares, but New York’s ousted pair are not interested. The fact that some 40,000 gas lamps have disappeared from the sidewalks of New York in about a dozen years undoubtedly has shaken their confidence in the future of that form of defying darkness. Even the. retiring lightsmen, however, admit that the modern method of igniting street lamps in this city is a bit more expeditious than their procedure. At best they could atteud to only a small number of lights a day, while under the system now in general use in the city as many as 2,000 bulbs flash into brightness at the flick of the hand of one mechanic, to whom tending the lighting switch is only one of a number of duties around the sub-station power house in which he is employed. All except about 1,000 lamps of the forty-odd thousand in Manhattan are controlled from these stations. Prominent among the exceptions are the 500 lights in Central Park operated by time clocks at the base of the posts and wound up once a week. A few silrn streets on the lower east side, too, have electric lamps not as yet placed under central control. They are turned on and off by youthful, anil quite important, roundsmen. These free-lance lamps will be co-ordinated with the main system within a comparatively short time and then the young keymen will also have to seek other employment. There are ten central control stations in Manhattan • —the same units where the heavy vol tage produced at the main generating plants is stepped down for ordinary, consumption. Modern Control System.

It is taking liberties with the truth to say that the street lights are turned on by the mechanic’s gesture in the power house, according to Carroll H. Shaw, head of the transmission and distribution department of the New York Edison Company. Mr. Shaw points .out that the. switches do not control the wires 'carrying the light current itself, but operate powering devices which check the flow of “juice” during those hours when illumination is not required. When the current is withdrawn from these relays, the power conveyed on the regular cables gains the ascendency and the lamps begin to brighten their respective corners. There are 2,500,000 feet of this control wire in Manhattan alone.

As outlined by Mr. Shaw, the pui'pose ol’ this relay system is to make the company speedily aware of any breach in the lighting network. If the pick of a street sapper severs a control strand all the lights in that vicinity go on instantly. A single break will give life to. more than a hundred lamps. Within a few minutes a policeman or a publicspirited citizen will advise the company that current is being unnecessarily consumed and an emergency crew is quickly dispatched to investigate and repair the damage. It is expected that within two or three years all the street lamps of the city will be included in the central control system. Early Methods This method of thoroughfare illumination is quite an improvement over (hat provided in an ordinance of New York’s Common Council, passed after a good deal of discussion on December 2, 1597. It specified that “lights be put in ye darke time of the moon within this city and, for the ease of the inhabitants, that every seventh house in the several wards of this city do, every night until the 25th day of March next, cause a lantern and candle to be hung on a pole and that the charge be defrayed in equal proportion by the inhabitants of the said seven houses , upon ■ penalty of nine pence for every default.”

Subsequent bodies of city fathers made amendments to this instrument to conform to the changing character of the city and the advances in the science of illumination. The present Board of Estimate, for example, approved the expenditure of slightly less than 5,000,000 dollars for last year’s maintenance and current for the 115,592 lamps then studding the city. Another 16,000 were installed in 1925, according to Nicholas J. Kelly, chief engineer of light and power for the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity. There were 4,000 hours of street lighting in New York in 1928 and the 1929 schedules provide for 50 hours more. The time for turning the lamps on and off during each day of the year is specified on a table compiled by Mr. Kelly and his associates before January 1. Copies of this schedule are supplied to the eight utility companies serving the ■ city. The central.control system makes possible the minute observance of these stipulated times, a decided advantage over individual lamplighting which had made it necessary for the knights of the wand to ignite half their charges before the official time and half after it, owing to their pardonable inability to be in 50 places at once.