The opening of “Tower of Light,” Megan Garber’s new Atlantic piece which recalls how Americans created “artificial moonlight” in the years before electrical infrastructure was available:

“First they tried to make moons.

In the early years of electricity — a time when steady illumination was new and expensive and unwieldy — Americans knew one thing clearly: They wanted light, and lots of it, and as quickly as possible, please. What they were less sure of, though, was how they would get that light. A grid of electric lamps, studded throughout towns — a system that mimicked and often repurposed the infrastructure of gas lamps — was the early and obvious method. But street lights required wires, which, when hastily assembled, had an annoying tendency to disentangle themselves and fall into the streets below. At best, this was an inconvenience, at worst, a deadly danger. Street lamps were also investment-intensive: Towns needed a lot of them to provide the bright light that people found themselves craving. They were also expensive. They took time to install. They meant pockets of bright light punctuated, where the lamps failed to reach, by complementary swaths of darkness.

City leaders, racing to bring their towns into the future and encouraged by electric companies seeking the same destination, tried to find better ways, cheaper ways, quicker ways to illuminate the American landscape. And in their haste to vanquish nature by erasing the line between day and night, they ended up looking to nature as a guide. They looked up, seeking a model in the largest and most reliable source of nocturnal light they knew: the moon.”