The Haunted Highways

 

Before the internet, before Google, before Wikipedia, we used an earlier method of obtaining information on items of interest: ‘ask your dad’. Our dad would usually be able to provide an answer to anything we needed to know, and if he didn’t know himself, he probably knew which books to look in. At a very early age, I’d become curiously fascinated by street lamps and wondered why certain of them were orange whilst others gave off a greenish-white light. Our dad’s explanation, delivered from the driving seat of our Hillman Minx saloon, was that the orange lamps (such as the one outside our house) were ‘sodium discharge’ whilst the greenish type we passed on the way to our grandparents were ‘mercury vapour.’ It wasn’t necessary for me to understand those terms or the technicalities involved. I just needed to put names to them.

Whilst sodium lighting can still be seen in urban areas and even some motorways, it is gradually being phased out in favour of LCD lighting arrays, which give off a brighter, white light with a normal colour spectrum: sodium was well known for its monochromatic effect. Mercury vapour lamps, on the other hand, have disappeared completely, at least here in the UK. A Google image search reveals that these lights with their ghostly greenish hue are still in use in some parts of the USA, and probably elsewhere in the world. When first introduced in the early 1930s, mercury discharge lighting soon earned itself a morbid nickname: people referred to them as ‘cadaver lamps’ for the effect they had on the human complexion: the absence of red from the lamps’ spectrum lent faces the appearance of bloodless corpses. Any busy city street seen under mercury lighting would have given the appearance of a zombie apoaclypse in progress as all passers by had their complexions drained of colour. Various attempts were made to correct this, by coating the bulbs with flourescent powder, but these reduced the lamps’ efficiency, and on main roads at least, the old style ‘cadaver lamps’ persisted until the 1960s or even the early 70s.

Our street in Sutton Coldfield was lit by mercury lamps, which had been there since the 1950s. These were probably of the modified variety, as I don’t remember the ‘corpsing’ effect being noticeable. You can see the greenish glow around the lantern in the top picture which I took using a self-timer in the early 80s. As a contrast, the orange hue of the high pressure sodium lamps on the adjoining main road can be seen through the trees in the background.

Mercury streetlamps were already on the way out by the 1960s, with the adoption of the new, high-pressure sodium units on all major roads and motorways. I began to notice their disappearance in the 1970s, with the loss of that strange, haunted atmosphere that had pervaded Britain’s highways since the 1930s. The bottom image, sourced off Wikipedia, shows mercury lighting in use somewhere in the USA, and gives an accurate impression of how many of our major roads once looked after dark.

Today’s replacement units may give better light, but their installations lack the style and grace of earlier lighting columns, as functionality (and cost) wins out over form. And they don’t turn people into zombies either… which means that any you happen to encounter on the street will almost certainly be the real thing.