The Fair at Night

Earlier world's fairs lit their buildings by outlining them in thousands of bare bulbs. San Francisco hid its lamps. Walter D'Arcy Ryan of General Electric washed the palaces in reflected light from sources the public never saw, hung the Tower of Jewels with more than a hundred thousand swinging cut-glass "jewels," and put on a searchlight show three nights a week that reached across the Golden Gate. Lighting engineers of the day saw it as a turning point in their field.

Ryan

Walter D'Arcy Ryan ran General Electric's illuminating engineering laboratory at Schenectady, New York. Todd says Ryan "had developed indirect lighting effects into a scientific speciality." Barry adds that he had lit the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York, and modern accounts add that he floodlit Niagara Falls in 1907. By Ryan's own account, he met the Exposition's Director of Works and its architects in August 1912 and presented his scheme three months later. Todd records his appointment as Chief of Illumination on December 2, 1912. GE spent heavily on experiments at Schenectady, ran a branch laboratory on the grounds, and lent the fair a team of engineers and designers. Ryan's Bureau of Illumination sat within G. L. Bayley's Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. Jules Guérin, the chief of color, kept watch over how the light would look against his palette.

Ryan was involved from the start. He claimed that "for the first time in history the lighting of an International Exposition was completely designed and charted before the buildings were erected." He suggested surface textures for the buildings and specified the glass used in their windows. He lost one argument. The architects overruled him on the height and bulk of the lighting standards in the daytime view, and he conceded that "the night effect was unfortunately sacrificed."

Hiding the lamps

At Buffalo in 1901 and at the fairs after it, the standard way to light an exposition was to run strings of incandescent bulbs along every cornice, arch and dome. Ryan said the method "could probably not be surpassed" as a spectacle, but it had become the stuff of amusement parks, and it worked against architecture.

"Previous exposition buildings have, in the main, been used as a background on which to display lamps.… Its particular disadvantage is that it suppresses the architecture which becomes secondary."

W. D'A. Ryan, General Electric Review (June 1915)

In San Francisco the main palaces had no outline lighting at all. Arc floodlights were hidden behind shields and heraldic banners on tall standards. Searchlights on the rooftops picked out towers, sculpture and flags. Lamps dipped in an orange tint were tucked into cornices and recesses. Todd summed up the result: "the light you saw was, in most cases, reflected from the buildings themselves." The walls glowed softly, and the towers and statuary were lit more brightly so that the scene had depth. Exposed bulbs were kept to the Zone, the South Gardens, the state and foreign sections and a few entrances. The pre-fair Fact Book had promised that "indirect" lighting would be used outdoors "for the first time at any exposition." Ryan wrote afterward that many people had doubted the public would come to see anything without the glare of bare bulbs, and that the crowds proved them wrong.

The sources count the equipment differently. Todd gives "over 370 searchlights" plus 500 open projectors and a hundred 13-inch lensed searchlights for sculpture and flags. Barry lists 373 arc searchlights of 13 to 36 inches, 450 small ones nicknamed the "Mosquito Fleet," and 250 incandescent projectors for the flags. According to Ryan, about 8 million square feet were lit, at levels he set according to the purpose of each surface. Gardens and roads were kept dim, facades brighter, and towers and sculpture brightest. The Pacific Gas and Electric Company lent most of the apparatus, including 1,076 magnetite arc lamps and 517 transformers. Todd gives the peak load on opening day as 8,100 kilowatts, and Ryan gives 8,200. None of the sources gives a single total cost for the illumination.

Guérin's colors were part of the design. White glass globes clashed with the palette, so they were sprayed with a lacquer the color of travertine. Towers were first bathed in ruby light and then allowed to fade to rose. Ryan wrote that "the Guerin colors which fascinate in the daytime are even more entrancing by night." Barry put it more briefly: "Ryan was putting on his colors like a painter, one over another."

The Tower of Jewels

The fair's nickname came from Ryan's most unusual idea. He covered the 435-foot Tower of Jewels with pieces of cut glass that the Exposition called "novagems." Todd and Ryan both put the number at 102,000, and Ryan says the jewels "suggested the official title 'Jewel City.'" The Official Guide and Barry give higher counts, and all the sources agree there were more than 100,000. According to Todd, they were cut and polished in Bohemia, where such work was a cottage industry. The last shipment of 5,000 nearly got stuck in Austria when the war began and reached New York on a neutral ship. The stones ranged from 21 to 47 millimeters. Each had a small mirror behind it and hung loose on a brass hook, so that it swung in the wind. They came in ruby, emerald, sapphire, white, yellow and aquamarine. The globe at the top was covered in "emeralds" and belted with "diamonds." More novagems glittered on the figures of the Court of the Universe.

"When the 54 searchlights were turned on the Tower and the flickering 'novagems' caught the beams, splintered them into millions of colored lances and dartled them all over the grounds and the nearby heights of the city, the effect was at once dazzling and delicate beyond all power to describe."

Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921)

On a few special nights the Tower was made to look as if it were on fire. Concealed ruby lamps and pans of red fire burned behind its colonnades. Ryan used the effect on the ninth anniversary of the 1906 fire, when the whole Exposition was "bathed in red, with a strikingly realistic demonstration of the burning of the 'Tower of Jewels.'" Todd says it looked like "a pyramid of incandescent metal, glowing toward white heat and about to melt."

The Scintillator

The show that people remembered best was the Scintillator. It stood on a small mole projecting into the Yacht Harbor, at the north edge of the grounds, and consisted of two banks of forty-eight 36-inch searchlights, each fitted with changeable colored gelatin screens. A detail of Marines operated it, taking orders by telephone. When the Marines were sent to Mexico in late November, apprentice seamen from Yerba Buena Island replaced them. Ryan's figure for the Scintillator's combined intensity was over 2.6 billion candlepower. Todd wrote that it "projected the greatest blaze of artificial light ever radiated from one spot on the earth, down to that time. Had anyone been looking this way from Mars he must have thought somebody had at least struck a match."

Ryan found that the beams showed best when there was something in the air to catch them. On clear nights he made his own clouds. A Southern Pacific locomotive was parked on the fireworks pier with its drive wheels raised clear of the track, so that its engineer could "run" it at high speed and pour out steam. Two hundred seventy-five steel mortars buried in sand fired smoke bombs and Japanese figure shells that burst about 500 feet up. The searchlights played on the steam and smoke, and on the fog when San Francisco supplied it. Ryan wrote that foggy nights made effects possible that could not be had at any other time.

The general illumination came on every night at 7:30. On three nights a week the fireworks and the "Scintillator drill" followed, starting at 7:45 and lasting about an hour. According to the Official Guide there were over 300 effects. Todd prints a typical program of twenty-five numbers:

1. Announcement salute
2. Salvo of 48 four-inch smoke maroons
3. Aurora Borealis, centered on the Tower of Jewels
4. Beam drill: Luminous Plaids and Birth of Color
5. Ground mine or Palm Tree maroon
6. Illumination of the Exposition façades
7. Devil's Fan
8. Salvo of flag shells
9. White fan centered on Tamalpais
10. Fighting serpents and octopus
11. Beam drill
12. Salvo of six-inch smoke maroons
13. Ground mine in white, or Palm Tree maroon
14. Spook's Parade in white
15. Salvo of Golden Palm smoke maroons
16. Searchlight drill
17. Plumes of Paradise
18. Salvo of figure shells
19. Chromatic Wheels and Fairy Feathers
20. Spook's Parade in color
21. Salvo of smoke maroons
22. The Spirit of the Twentieth Century
23. Ground mine
24. American Flag
25. Zone Salvo

The instruction at the end read: "Form Aurora Borealis and hold for half hour." Ryan's aurora, a fan of colored beams, reached "from the Golden Gate to Sausalito." Other effects in his repertoire included "Sun-Burst," "Scotch Plaids," "Ghost Dance," shells that burst into the flags of the nations, and artificial clouds for "midnight sunsets."

The courts by night

Each court was lit differently. In the Court of the Universe, two glass columns five feet across and 30 feet high each held ninety-six 1,500-watt nitrogen-filled lamps behind sandblasted screens, and the court's fountains sent up columns of lit water. Todd writes that lamps in the colonnade niches made the columns look like "exudations of burning pitch." The Court of Abundance was the most theatrical. Sculptured serpents spouted gas flames, steam rose from cauldrons, and red fire burned in great salvers, so that "rose-colored vapors billowed" through the cloisters. In the Court of the Four Seasons, the water was lit from an unseen source beneath it. In the Palace of Fine Arts, searchlights on the roofs across the lagoon gave what Ryan called "triple moonlight," and a single 30-inch searchlight flooded the dome.

The dome of the Palace of Horticulture was lit from inside. Searchlights on rotating shafts shone up through revolving lenses and colored screens, so that bands and spots of color turned across the glass. Ryan called it "an astronomical sphere with its revolving spots, rings and comets." The Official Guide promised "processions of the Constellation of the Universe." Barry says the wrong glass had been delivered for the dome and limited what Ryan could do with it.

Light was also used to mark particular occasions. On St. Patrick's Day the searchlights were screened green, and orange was used on Orange Day. On April 13 the Exposition gave Ryan a bronze plaque in the Court of the Universe and declared that night Illumination Night. On closing night the lights were dimmed slowly. The last beam rested on Adolph Weinman's figure of Descending Night before it too went out (see The Story of the Fair).

The first look

The lighting was tested privately on February 10, 1915, and given a final trial on February 15. The poet Edwin Markham was there.

"I have to-night seen the greatest revelation of beauty that was ever seen on the earth.… the courts and buildings of the Panama-Pacific Exposition illuminated at night."

Edwin Markham, February 15, 1915, quoted in Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921)

The showmen on the Zone had a blunter view. One veteran told Todd that the Exposition's night lighting was "more wonderful than anything we can do," and that this was part of why the amusement street struggled (see The Zone).

Why it mattered

For the lighting profession, 1915 marked a clear change of method. Ryan's paper to the Illuminating Engineering Society in 1916 was introduced with the claim that the Exposition "marked the turning point from bizarre pageant illumination to the radiant grandeur and beauty of flood lighting from concealed sources." The Society's committee on progress called the fair "the most striking example of the progress of illuminating engineering that has ever been presented." General Electric's review of 1915 said:

"It was here that the flood lighting of buildings was introduced and the luminous shadow had its inception."

General Electric Review (January 1916)

The same review reported that floodlighting "has spread all over the country" since. In London, the editor of The Illuminating Engineer wrote that "a new precedent in exhibition lighting has been established." Ryan himself went on to light Chicago's Century of Progress in 1933, according to modern accounts, and the idea of lighting architecture instead of decorating it with bulbs became common practice in the years that followed.

Some novagems survived the fair. In 1918 the Exposition paid $6,336.60 in customs duty on "some 12 tons of 'novagems,'" and cases of them had been given as souvenirs to honored guests, among them the builder of the Panama Canal. What Survived follows them.

Sources

• Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (1921): vol. 1, ch. LXX (the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering; energy supply and costs) and ch. LXXIX (Ryan's appointment); vol. 2, ch. LXIII ("And There Was Light"), chs. LXVIII, LXX; vol. 3 (Illumination Night; special nights); vol. 5, ch. XXXIV (closing night).
• W. D'A. Ryan, "Illumination of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition," General Electric Review 18 (June 1915), pp. 579ff. (archive.org: generalelectricr18gene).
• W. D'A. Ryan, paper in Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society 11 (1916), pp. 629–639 (archive.org: illuminatingengi11illu).
• "Developments in the Electrical Industry During 1915," General Electric Review 19 (January 1916) (archive.org: generalelectricr19gene).
• A. A. Willoughby, article on the PPIE lighting, Electrical Review and Western Electrician 66, no. 23 (June 5, 1915).
• The Illuminating Engineer (London), July and August 1915.
• Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), "Illumination"; The Exposition Fact Book (3rd ed.); Condensed Facts.
• John D. Barry, The City of Domes (1915).
• Modern context on Ryan's career (Niagara Falls, 1907; Century of Progress, 1933): Wikipedia, "Walter D'Arcy Ryan."