Question of the Day - 20 January 2023

In the 1880s, a Parisian administrator, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, was tasked with modernizing Paris. That involved everything from cleaning up the water and sewer systems and building a central market, Les Halles, to building parks, prisons, and hospitals and lighting the streets with gas lanterns. Haussman's motto, at least according to some historians, was "Light before all else" and he oversaw the installation of 20,000 gas-fueled street lamps; in 1889, Paris was one of the earliest urban areas to light its streets. Ever since, Paris has been known far and wide as the City of Lights.  

However, in 1881, eight years earlier, the town of Aurora, Illinois, became one of the first in the U.S. to install electric street lights. That, and possibly due to the name "Aurora," the town adopted the nickname City of Lights.

Since then, at least according to our research, any number of cities have claimed to be the City of Light or Lights. When Buffalo, New York, for example, lit up its avenues in the late 19th century, it took on the nickname. Los Angeles, Baltimore, Anchorage (Alaska), Miami, and Wheeling (West Virginia) have also laid claim to the moniker over the years.

Though Las Vegas, as reported by National Geographic, is "the brightest city on Earth as seen from space at night," we ourselves have never used City of Lights or City of Light as a nickname for it. Have you? Even if it is the undisputed City of Lights on Earth and even if the nickname has been applied to it, it certainly hasn't stuck. 

Besides, also according to National Geo, Hong Kong is the world's brightest city from a terrestrial perspective, emitting 1,000 times more light than the international average. So we guess the designation also has to do with the vantage point.

By the way, Pyongyang, North Korea, with a population of 3.1 million, is the darkest city both from space and land.

Speaking of dark, back to the best-known City of Lights, Paris has followed France in taking steps to tone down the brightness. In 2013, a law was passed by the French government requiring all buildings in the country to turn off their lights between 1 and 7 a.m. as an energy saver.

Our research also turned up the idea that Paris became known as the City of Lights less for the streetlights than for its "Siècle des Lumières" or Century of Lights, also known as the Age of Enlightenment. This took place between 1715, the year that Louis XIV died, and the French Revolution in 1789, when such French luminaries as Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, and Montesquieu were among the reigning philosophers in Europe, imparting the "light of knowledge." 

We'd be hard pressed to claim that Sin City can compete with Paris's share of famous philosophers. But in any competition of electric lights, Las Vegas wins handily.