For most of the nineteenth century, a city's nighttime was governed by the lamplighter, who walked a fixed route each dusk, touching his pole to one gas lamp after another. His was a trusted public office, and his rounds gave a rhythm to the evening that residents set their habits by. The spread of electric arc lighting in the 1880s, and the central switch that could illuminate a whole district at once, made the office obsolete within a generation. The change was hailed as progress, and rightly so. Yet some older citizens complained that the streets, once warmed into life lamp by lamp, now simply snapped on, as if the night had been handed a verdict rather than coaxed toward morning.