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Brox connects improvements in artificial light, from gaslit mills to electrified factories, to the extension of work into the night, as employers could run shifts that no longer depended on daylight or costly tallow. Light became a tool of production as well as a household comfort, though the same history also traces how cheaper light expanded evening leisure.
Candles and oil lamps were made, stored and tended within the household, so each family controlled its own light. Gas mains and electric grids moved that control to distant central utilities. Households gained effortless abundance but lost self-sufficiency, and that dependency becomes visible only when the network fails, as in large blackouts.
By the 1930s most urban American homes had electricity, but only about one in ten farms did, because private utilities judged rural lines unprofitable. The Rural Electrification Administration, created in 1935, financed farmer-run cooperatives to string the lines. Farm families described the arrival of electric light and pumps as the end of lamp-cleaning, hand-hauled water and early darkness, a change they experienced as a break between two ways of life.
For most of history, light was the scarce and precious thing and night was the default condition. Cheap electric light and now LEDs reverse this, so darkness becomes the rare resource. People lose sight of the stars, ecosystems and circadian rhythms are disrupted, and true night becomes something people must deliberately seek or protect.