F I R S TP R E V616NEXTLAST

Lighting San Francisco
In 1854 San Francisco installed its first 47 gas street lamps. The clean lights seemed a miracle after the years of dirty, smokey oil lamps that proceeded them. Historians and poets of the time wrote of how the yellow beams illuminated the hearts of the city's citizens. By 1880 San Francisco had installed an incredible 5,462 gas lamps. But things were about to change once again. One year earlier, a building at Fourth and Market was illuminated by two tiny brush arc-light dynamos and a newly-formed electric company offered service from sundown to midnight for $10 per lamp, per week. Today that company, Pacific Gas and Electric, has annual revenues of over $11.7 billion.
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