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homes. Over time, though, as cities grew and commerce between and within them increased, daily life inevitably extended more and more into the dark hours. By the late 1600s, authorities in large European and several American cities began to require householders to hang a lamp or place a candle on their street-facing windowsills for a few hours after winter sunset and during the dark of the moon. Like the lights required of travelers, the sill lights were meant to help the authorities. The lamp on the sill was also "a lamp that
waits,
" notes Gaston Bachelard. "It watches so unremittingly that it
guards.
" And it was regarded in return. There would always be something of the cold taste of order in public lighting.
    The times and days set for lighting the lanterns remained variable for centuries—changing with the seasons, with the lunar phases, and with days of religious observance. Eventually, officials issued detailed schedules. In 1719, for example, a Paris district commissar required the following: "On 1 December a half candle (⅛ pound) is to be lit. From 2 to 21 December inclusive, whole candles (¼ pound) are to be used. On 22 and 23 December no candles are to be lit. On 24 December, Christmas Eve, twelve-pound candles are to be burned. From 25 to 27 December, no lighting is to be used at all."
    Oftentimes citizens resented the obligation. In New York, for instance, "the magistrates—remarking on 'the great Inconvenience that Attends this Citty, being A trading place for want of Lights,'—ordered that every house have a light 'hung out on a Pole' from an upper window 'in the Darke time of the Moon.' When homeowners objected to the expense, the magistrates retreated to a requirement that only every seventh house need present 'A Lanthorn & Candle,' and only in winter, the cost to be shared by the owners of the other six." The duty was undertaken reluctantly, not only because of the expense but also because it was a fussy task—lights had to be constantly tended to keep them from guttering, smoking, or dying out. And if by chance a watchman spied a cold lantern, he would rouse the one responsible for it and make him tend it.
    Those first lanterns and candles hardly figured in the dark. At best they were unsteady and faint, barely protected from wind and rain, and easily put out with a stick or stone. But they also marked the beginning of a new conversation with night, offering a little more freedom and time—maybe for work, maybe for the counter life that the night always offered: a chance for pleasure and the risk of transgression. And one after another down the streets, like channel markers, they staked the human community in the dark: here, here, here, here.

    Light always seems to beget more light. As the nightscape grew livelier with comings and goings, with the sound of human voices leaking from taverns and coffeehouses, which had become common by 1700, with their late hours and their offerings of stimulants—tea and chocolate as well as coffee—keeping order became a more complex task for the authorities, and they required more, and more dependable, light to help them. On the corners of the largest streets in Boston, the night watchmen kept iron fire baskets filled and burning (there would not be streetlamps there until the late eighteenth century), and in London, Paris, New York, Turin, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam, authorities erected stationary streetlights to replace residents' sill lamps. Maintained by the cities and paid for with taxes, the lights not only shone more frequently in the winter but also were often lit during the summer and during all phases of the moon.
    Even so, to the English writer William Sidney, the streetlamps in eighteenth-century London were "totally inadequate to dispel the Cimmerian gloom in which London was shrouded in the winter months." Sidney continued:
The light, such as it was, was derived mainly from several thousands of small tin vessels, which were