Lamp Posts

A street light, lamppost, street lamp, light standard or lamp standard, is a raised source of light on the edge of a road, turned on or lit at a certain time every night. more...

Modern lamps may also have light-sensitive photocells to turn them on at dusk and off at dawn, or activate automatically in dark weather. It is also not uncommon for street lights to be on posts which have wires strung between them, such as on telephone poles or utility poles.

History of street lighting

Further information: History of street lighting in the United States

Before incandescent lamps, gas lighting was employed. The earliest lamps required that a lamplighter tour the town at dusk, lighting each of the lamps, but later designs employed ignition devices that would automatically strike the flame when the gas supply was activated. The earliest of such street lamps were built in the Arab Empire, especially in Cordoba.

The first electric street lighting employed arc lamps, initially the 'Electric candle', 'Jablochoff candle' or 'Yablochkov candle' developed by the Russian Pavel Yablochkov in 1875. This was a carbon arc lamp employing alternating current, which ensured that the electrodes burnt down at the same rate. Yablochkov candles were first used to light the Grands Magasins du Louvre, Paris where 80 were deployed. Soon after, experimental arrays of arc lamps were used to light Holborn Viaduct and the Thames Embankment in London - the first electric street lighting in Britain. More than 4,000 were in use by 1881, though by then an improved differential arc lamp had been developed by Friederich von Hefner‑Alteneck of Siemens & Halske. The United States was swift in adopting arc lighting, and by 1890 over 130,000 were in operation in the US, commonly installed in exceptionally tall moonlight towers.

Read more at Wikipedia.org