Lighting

Some of you readers may remember the old days when a single light bulb hung in the middle of the room. Perhaps that was the light in your grandmother’s kitchen. Few, if any, of us can remember the really old days before electricity. Life was so different. Certainly sleep deprivation was less of a problem because people went to bed early. It was simply too difficult to see by candlelight or the light of the fireplace. Thanks to Thomas Edison, who invented the first light bulb in his New Jersey laboratory in 1879, and the backing of financier J.P. Morgan, the Edison General Electric Company was created in 1888 and the electrification of this country began. Richmond, Virginia boasted the first electric street car; Columbia, South Carolina boasted the first electrically powered cotton mill. By 1905 Buck Duke’s Southern Power Company set out to electrify entire river valleys in the Carolinas. Thanks to George Westinghouse, the use of alternating current made the distribution of electricity over a wide area possible. After that, factories could locate wherever they wished, not always next to hydroelectric power sources or coal supplies. By the 1920s someone rising before dawn could see how to make breakfast.

Lighting is one of the most exciting elements of interior design, and it is essential that the designer must be familiar with the qualities, functions and characteristics of lighting to use it effectively. How familiar you may ask? As you can see from Chapter Eleven of your text, lighting can be studied from a technical point of view—light meters, candelas, lumenes, wattage, kilowatts, and color wavelengths measured in nanometers. But lighting can also be studied and developed as a creative, artistic or design topic. The vast subject of lighting can be a bewildering mix of art and science, so what does a designer need to know? According....