Marking the 320th anniversary of St. Petersburg. The Presidential Library reveals the history of lighting in the city

St. Petersburg is the first city in Russia to have regular lighting. The materials of the Presidential Library tell about how this innovation was introduced in the “most intentional city”.

By the foundation of St. Petersburg in 1703, street lighting existed only in Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, London, Hanover, and a few other cities. For a long time, residents of European cities had to use hand-held lanterns. After Peter the Great’s first trip abroad, the carrying of lanterns for some time became the duty of St. Petersburg residents, and the architect Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, invited from Paris and put by Peter at the head of the entire construction business in the new capital, was ordered to draft a street lamp device.

By 1718, the project received the highest approval, and the preparation of lanterns according to the sketches of the French architect began at the Yamburg factories of the associate of the tsar, Alexander Menshikov. The first lanterns were installed on Admiralty Island, near the Winter Palace and the Admiralty. Then, Peter raised the question of finding funds to illuminate the whole of St. Petersburg. This is revealed in the essay Street Lighting of the City of St. Petersburg (1914) by Georgy Semenovich, a technician at the department for lighting the capital,

It was planned to use hemp oil for lighting. There was also an indication in the estimate that a lamplighter with tools – a ladder, a small hand lantern, a brush, a sponge, a measuring stick – was assigned for every 15 lanterns. At the end of December 1723, the Senate decided that certain taxes should be introduced to raise the amount required for lighting city streets. For the maintenance of lanterns, they decided to use other sources of city income: a yoke fee, a fee from inns, etc. Just 20 years after its foundation, St. Petersburg was supplied with street lighting.

During the 18th century, along with the expansion of the urban development area, the number of lanterns increased. By 1770, there were already more than 2,200 of them. Empress Catherine II transferred responsibility for maintaining lighting to private hands, and the lighting season was extended from August 1 to April 22. “Every night from dusk to three o'clock after midnight, on all dark nights except moonlit” lanterns had to be lit, for which contractors received a certain amount of money from the city. Both sides in the performance of their duties, as G. L. Semenovich says, “were not particularly careful”. At times, the city could not pay contractors for work. As a result, not all the lanterns were lit, and after three or more, they were extinguished before the due date. “Great darkness reigned in the city from one lantern to another”, and, as is known, “robbery and other disorders are conveniently carried out through darkness, which is contrary to the deanery and order”. Under Alexander the Great, a decree was issued according to which the costs “for lighting lanterns facing state-owned institutions are assigned to these latter”.

The appearance of the lanterns was taken seriously: they were not supposed to spoil, but on the contrary, decorate the capital. How these structures looked like can be judged by the documents stored in the Presidential Library’s collections. In the Case on Lighting the Local Capital with Lanterns of a Special Invention (1802), a drawing and description of pillars for city lanterns with iron stands are featured: “A pillar from the ground 4 meters high (3.37 m) from a log with a thickness of 8 vershoks (35.5 cm)”. The bottom of the pedestal was proposed to be sheathed with clean one-and-a-half-inch boards. The structure was supposed to be painted: a pedestal in gray colour looking like a wild stone, and the lamppost itself with a lattice strip in white and dark green with a “red tint”. The lamp stands were iron, elegantly curved, their thickness was also strictly stipulated. Some lanterns were attached to the stone walls of buildings.

In 1839, the first gas lanterns began to appear on the streets of St. Petersburg. For the experiment, gas lamps were installed in the city instead of the removed 215 oil lamps. Of course, the innovations were used in chic places – 20 such lanterns were installed at the Alexander Column, 30 on Gorokhovaya Street, 23 on Sadovaya Street, most of them (84 lanterns) were on Nevsky Avenue – from Admiralty to Liteyny Avenue.

When the hopes of using gas to reduce the cost of street lighting did not come true, the city’s administration tried to use bread alcohol mixed with turpentine for lanterns. However, due to the losses of “materials” that inevitably arose when refueling lanterns, it was decided to develop a new way of lighting the city – with kerosene (in Russia, it was just learned to extract it from oil in 1860). Gradually, gas and kerosene lighting replaced oil and alcohol lanterns. Even with the advent of electric lighting, kerosene and gas lanterns continued to be used, and disappeared from the streets of the city only in the 1930s.

Electricity in St. Petersburg was used at first as a trendy and spectacular physical experience. It is said that during the coronation of Alexander II, “10 electric suns were arranged”, and the first tries of electric lighting were made in St. Petersburg in 1879 by the method of the Russian electrical engineer Pavel Yablochkov. The Palace Bridge was chosen as a place for experiments, and then the square near the monument to Catherine II. Then, the Alexander II Bridge (Liteyny) was illuminated in such way as well.

In the same years, another Russian electrical engineer Alexander Lodygin worked on the invention of the incandescent lamp in St. Petersburg. As the Soviet scientist Lev Belkind tells in the essay Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin (1948), the Lodygin lighting system was installed on Odessa Street, where the inventor’s workshop was located. It became the world’s first example of outdoor lighting using incandescent lamps. By the way, a monument to a lamplighter of the 19th century, whose profession gradually became unnecessary with the advent of electricity, was opened on this street in 1989.

The next street that shone with electric lights was Nevsky Avenue, where thirty arc lights were installed “from Morskaya Street to the Anichkov Bridge”, fixed on poles on both sides of the street in a staggered order, “and temporarily before laying underground cables, it was allowed to hang conductors on gas poles”, says Semenovich. A place was allocated for the placement of the electric station behind the Kazan Cathedral, and then it was decided to put the power plant on a wooden barge on the Moika River. Thus, since December 1883, electric lighting of Nevsky Avenue, the most famous thoroughfare of St. Petersburg, started.

#Presidential Library, #Lanterns, #Street lighting, #History of Russia

#History of St. Petersburg, #Interesting facts

Based on the Presidential Library’s materials:

Collection “Nevsky Prospekt (Nevsky Avenue)”

Case on Lighting the Local Capital with Lanterns of a Special Invention

G. Semenovich "Street Lighting of the City of St. Petersburg" (1914)

L. Belkind "Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin" (1948)