Jefferson spent 7% of his Secretary-of-State salary on artificial illumination. For the same share of our income, we can consume 75,000 times as much illumination as Jefferson could in his day. How much extra utility to we derive from our spending on artificial illumination?...
There was one big advantage to having only very high priced illumination. You could see the stars. I am reminded of trying to locate Messier objects (nebulae and galaxies and such) cataloged by their namesake. He used and instrument which I heard described as the equivalent to a broke binocular if you smeared Vaseline on the lens, from Paris. Now I had a twelve inch telescope in the far outskirts of SF, and I could find less than half of them. One mans gain is another mans loss.
There was one big advantage to having only very high priced illumination. You could see the stars. I am reminded of trying to locate Messier objects (nebulae and galaxies and such) cataloged by their namesake. He used and instrument which I heard described as the equivalent to a broke binocular if you smeared Vaseline on the lens, from Paris. Now I had a twelve inch telescope in the far outskirts of SF, and I could find less than half of them. One mans gain is another mans loss.