Mehmet Murat Ildan, a Turkish dramatist and novelist, is well-known for his sayings and observations regarding lighting. He once penned, "What god are you looking for in a dark street apart from the streetlight which illuminates your way?"

Although it may be over the top to anoint lamps with supernatural power, the value of light illuminating our sidewalks and roads cannot be overstated. In addition to the sun's and moon's natural light, fire has been used by mankind as a source of illumination for thousands of years. The first tools to fill this need were hand-held torches, but the oldest recorded instance of fixed position lighting is from China in 500 B.C. People in Peking make flaming torches for street lamps out of bamboo piping and naturally occurring gas vents.

Oil lamps outside of residences provided the ancient city of Rome with illumination at night. The Romans gave slaves the responsibility of ensuring that the lamps' oil was always full, lighting them at night, and extinguishing them before dawn. Families were required by law to hang lanterns in London in 1417, and Paris would later mandate that all windows facing the street offer nocturnal illumination via candles or lanterns.

Cities all throughout the world started utilizing gas-burning light fixtures to brighten city streets more than two millennia after the Peking gas lamps. Early users of this more effective technique for maintaining roadway visibility and safety at night included London, Baltimore, and Paris.



When the "Yablochkov candle" was placed in a lamp post in 1878, Paris once again set the standard for innovation in street lighting. The light source of this ground-breaking device was an electric arc. Within three years, Paris was covered in thousands of these arc lamps. The United States would quickly embrace electric street lights as well. Charles F. Brush presented his idea for an electric light fixture in 1879 with the goal of illuminating the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. Brush brought his creation to the public plaza in Cleveland, where he set up 12 arc lamps that astounded the large crowd that had assembled to see them. The first American city to permanently erect Brush's fixtures was Wabash, Indiana, which mounted four of them atop the courthouse a year later. More than 130,000 electrified vehicles will be sold in ten years powered street lights could be found across the USA.

Arc light fixtures, however, had a few serious drawbacks. They weren't particularly durable, and the light they produced was uncomfortable to the human eye. Thomas Edison's invention will soon replace the arc lamps on lamp posts around the country with incandescent bulbs. The carbon-thread incandescent lamp, which Edison also introduced in 1879, will eventually replace other lighting options for electric street lamps. In the first decades of the 20th century, streets with electric lights lining the sidewalks and roads were referred to as "a white way." Based on the quantity of electrically powered lights and signs, Broadway in New York City came to be known as the "Great White Way". 

Low-pressure sodium lamps were developed in Europe in the 1930s, and high-pressure sodium (HID) lights started to replace them around 1965 as lighting technology advanced. Until the early 21st century, when light-emitting diodes (LED), initially invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak, Jr., became commercially viable for all types of lighting applications, HID street lights were the predominant type of highway illumination used across the world. Globally, LEDs are now being quickly embraced for lampposts and public lights. By comparing the clean white output of an LED lamp post to the yellow/orange colours produced by HPS street lights, you can easily identify the type of light source utilized on a roadway. Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2006 became the first U.S. city to deploy LED street lights, and soon thereafter, most major metropolitan areas were following suit.

Street lighting is crucial for the safety of drivers, emergency vehicles, cyclists, joggers, and pedestrians, whether it be the ornamental lamp post lighting up city centers and neighborhoods or the imposing interstate light poles that cross our country. Section.