Lightbulb.

Light has always had a central relationship with our humanity. In mythology, the Greek god Prometheus stole fire for us, after his brother Epimetheus, designed all other animals and gave them the gifts of claws, gills and wings. In history, the harnessing of fire belongs to humans and humans alone. Neanderthals used tools and weapons to help their hunt but it is Homo Sapiens and Homo Sapiens only, that wield fire. It was around campfires that we grew less and less afraid of nightfall, developing dance and storytelling to fend off the darkness. The bonfire gave birth to community, and so for millennia it defined humanity. As these collective campfires gave way to torches, candles and oil lamps, the human spirit was carried inside; into the home, but also into each individual. Writers and scientists could continue to express themselves and study the world long into the night, even as that world fell into its own shadow.

There was however, an upper limit to this convenience. Too few candles or lamps and one risked damaging their eyes, as was the cause of poet John Milton’s blindness. Too many candles and the stifling heat could be distracting, even overwhelming. Most importantly, one always had to keep a window or door ajar, lest these contained fires burn up all the room’s available oxygen. Something new was needed. We needed to seal the home by sealing the lightsource: we needed the lightbulb.

Often falsely attributed to Thomas Edison, the invention of the lightbulb was actually a gradual process stretching from 1810 to 1910, involving the incremental work of many individuals. What each design had in common was the electrified filament, and a sealed glass globe filled with a vacuum or an inert gas at very low pressure. This sealed tube is the central metaphor of the lightbulb. With the birth of the enclosed lightbulb came the birth of the complete concept. With a lightbulb (or several) in place, we could finally close our doors. And once sealed, we were free to design our homes properly. Now our homes were no longer simply a place to stay in, they were something to live in. Architecture affects the way our minds work: caves produced hunter’s thoughts, huts produced farmer’s thoughts, and sealed homes create sealed thoughts. Whole ideas. Complete concepts. When we can control the elements rather than have them control us, we can determine the edges of our spaces, and thus the edges of our ideas.

Before the lightbulb, our fire-based light sources fed on carbon and oxygen; the same organic materials that make up our bodies. Such compounds destroy the lightbulb, often instantly. The lightbulb transcends the organic, becoming purely conceptual. It is a product not of the body, but purely mind. The glow from a lightbulb is not like the flickering of a fire; it is a precise, perpetual spark. Pure and clean, it is thought stretched thin. In essence, light means meaning.

We can chart a history of humanity by the kinds of lightbulb we have used. Consider the classic tungsten globes that were our only option until fluorescents came along. Tungsten bulbs are incredibly inefficient, producing a dozen times more heat than light. Despite this, consider everything we created, all the progress we made under tungsten bulbs in a little over a century. It is reminiscent of the Amazon basin, and the fact that species are more diverse there simply because there is more heat near the equator- more energy for evolution to do its work. If tungsten bulbs represent evolution and energy, fluorescent bulbs are the opposite. The cornerstone in the ceiling of office buildings everywhere, they are efficient, cold, and sterile- just like the offices themselves. People tend to look slightly ill in the office because the wavelength of fluorescent light is slightly shorter than normal. It penetrates the skin a little deeper before bouncing back to the viewer’s eye, revealing more detail and imperfections. How suitable this is for an office environment, in which details are filed and refiled, systems itemised and items systemised, all whilst ignoring ‘The Bigger Picture’. If you get close enough to a fluorescent bulb, you can hear an almost subsonic hum, a whine just on the verge of human hearing. This ties into the subtext of most offices, and office life in general; entire skyscrapers, entire cities filled with a silently screaming majority, spiritually unfilled but keeping quiet because it’s common, or because there is not yet an alternative.

Perhaps there lies hope in the next step, the LED light. Incredibly powerful, efficient and long-lasting, they can even be focused to transmit a laser-type beam over long distances. There’s no reason why you couldn’t broadcast a DVD quality video between two skyscrapers, using only LED light. What will such technology mean to us? And more importantly, what will we mean to such technology? It is especially fitting that the cartoon symbol for “I have an idea” is a lightbulb springing into life above one’s head, enclosed by a thought bubble. The lightbulb represents the bubble of thought itself: the enclosed idea, the complete concept. When thinking becomes Thought. When we “let there be light”, creativity becomes our creation. The moment we created the lightbulb is the moment that we decided to step out of the world and began to live in our heads.

/mr_metaphor.