Brilliant (27 page)

In London, when after nearly six years of nighttime restrictions the blackout order was lifted, the exhausted populace didn't seem to have the heart to light up the city again. The
New York Times
reported, "For every undraped window there were twenty in darkness. Some of the black-out windows showed chinks of light, which hitherto would have brought the air raid warden to the door.... Department stores stayed dark, as did the electric signs on Piccadilly. It will be some time before wiring can be refurbished." The streetlamps also remained dark, because their wires needed to be refurbished as well. "The few householders who left their windows bare had to remember that a front room from the street looked like a well-lighted stage set and act accordingly. Mostly they blacked out, as before."

D
URING THE LONG MONTHS
in which the lights were out all over Europe, the Paleolithic drawings in the Lascaux Cave were discovered. On September 8, 1940, in the Vézère Valley in the Black Périgord of France—then known as Vichy France—seventeen-year-old Marcel Ravidat, along with several friends and Ravidat's dog, were roaming the hills above their town. In the nineteenth century, the land had been cultivated with grapevines, but when the vines were killed by phylloxera, local farmers dug them up and planted the area in pines. When one of the trees toppled over early in the twentieth century, it revealed an opening in the ground about the size of the entrance to a fox's den, which the farmers blocked off to protect their cattle from possible injury. Legend has it that during Ravidat's walk, his dog fell into the hole, and when Ravidat scrambled to the dog's rescue, he noticed an opening to a deep shaft. He and some friends returned four days later. "I made myself a very rustic but quite adequate lamp from an old oil pump and a few meters of string," Ravidat recalled. "When we arrived at the hole I rolled some large stones into it and was surprised at the time they took to reach the bottom.... I set to work with my big knife ... to widen the hole so that we could get into it." After hours of digging, planning, and crawling, they arrived at the floor of the cave. "We raised the lamp to the height of the walls and saw in its flickering light several lines in various colours. Intrigued by these coloured lines, we set about meticulously exploring the walls and, to our great surprise, discovered several fair-sized animal figures there.... Encouraged by this success we began to go through the cave, moving from one discovery to the next. Our joy was indescribable."

In the following days, other boys came to explore the cave, as did the local schoolmaster and then local men and women. Within a few weeks, people from all over the region began to arrive—more than five hundred visitors in the span of one week. "Like a trail of gunpowder the rumor of our discovery had spread through the region," Ravidat said. Old women brought their own candles to see by. They walked over rough ground and climbed down the narrow entrance. The paintings then, seen by the light of rudimentary lamps and small open flames, must have appeared much as they had in the Pleistocene.

Scientists and archaeologists came as well and mapped the cave: Chamber, Hall, Gallery, Passageway, Apse, Shaft, and Nave. They named the paintings: Frieze of the Black Horses, Frieze of the Small Stags, Procession of Engraved Horses, Frieze of the Swimming Stags, Niche of the Felines. After the war, the number of visitors to Lascaux increased markedly, and in time a walkway was put in.

During the thousands of years that the Lascaux Cave had remained undiscovered, the temperature inside never rose above 59 degrees, and the humidity level stayed constant. When the cave was crowded with visitors, the temperature sometimes rose to nearly 90 degrees. In 1955 excess carbon dioxide, produced by the visitors' breath, caused the first noticeable signs of deterioration in the paintings. Water droplets began to appear on the walls, and as they trickled down, they erased the pigments on the backs and necks of the animals. In 1958, to mitigate this problem, an air-exchange machine was put in, but it also worked to scatter the pollen that came into the cave on the visitors' feet. As a result, algae—"green leprosy" it was called—began to ravage the paintings. The animals were disappearing "in a prairie" of algae, Ravidat recalled. Also apparent was the "white disease"—crystals of calcite encouraged by the increased levels of carbon dioxide, humidity, and temperature—which began to cloud the paintings. To protect them, the cave was closed to the public in 1963.

In 1981 Mario Ruspoli was asked by the French Ministry of Culture to make a cinematographic record of the Lascaux paintings. It took him years to complete his work, since he was allowed access to the cave for only twenty days a year, in March and April, when the cave was at its coldest. His crew could work for only two or three hours at a time so that the heat emanating from their bodies and their hand-held, 100-watt quartz lamps could dissipate. Just two of their lamps could raise the temperature by several degrees and also raise carbon dioxide and moisture levels. One human body gave off more heat than the lamps. Ruspoli recalled:

The lights were never held on a particular spot for longer than twenty seconds, and at the end of each take they were turned up to the ceiling or down to the floor, causing the image to fade into darkness.... After shooting it was advisable not to light the lamps for a little while in order to allow the slight rise in temperature caused by the bodies and the quartz lamps ... to disperse.

Our precision lenses sometimes surpassed the powers of perception of the naked eye, bringing out details which were only just discernible, particularly in the painted surfaces and around the figures.... At first it seemed that it would be impossible to film with so little light ... but in actual fact the opposite proved to be true.... Our modest resources and the restricted lighting that was permitted made us take a new cinematic approach to the art on the cave walls.... We had to use swift, precise and spontaneous takes, the camera moving forward through the dark cave and disclosing the space as it emerged.... This slow unfolding of the images in the silence of the cave took us to the edge of another world ... and we ourselves gradually began to feel like initiates.... The Upside-down Horse curves round a pier and the Great Black Auroch makes use of the curious relief of its concave niche: when it is seen at an angle from the end of the Gallery, only its head is visible; the body is concealed behind a projection in the rock and is only revealed when one moves towards it.... We noticed all this as we advanced, lamps in hand, along the wall toward the back of the cave. The painted figures emerged gradually from their hiding-places in the rock and this movement made them seem to come alive.... To the members of my team and myself, Lascaux became a sort of second homeland.

Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world.

—
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
,
Pale Fire

Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light.

—
RALPH ELLISON
,
Invisible Man

...we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape.

—
ROBINSON JEFFERS
,
"The Purse-Seine"

T
HE RURAL ELECTRIFICATION PROGRAM
slowed to a near halt when supplies and manpower were redirected to fighting World War II, but once hostilities ceased, the electrification of the American countryside resumed. By 1960, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rural Electric Administration, 96 percent of American farms were connected to electric lines. The average rural customer used about 400 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month, compared with the 1935 average of 60 to 90 kilowatt-hours per month. Although farms continued to disappear, rural lines connected more and more people as potato and beet fields, pastures, apple orchards, and orange groves were plowed under and turned into suburban neighborhoods. With the advent of nuclear energy, it was rumored that electricity would become too cheap to meter.

During these postwar years, the U.S. power industry remained stable. The New Deal regulations were still in place, and the industry grew at a steady 7 to 8 percent per year. The utility companies had come to be thought of as natural monopolies, and the power grid had reached a size and significance that could never have been imagined in the late nineteenth century, when a writer at
Harper's,
commenting on the accomplishment at Niagara, declared, "It is scarcely to be expected that current can be brought as far as New York [City] to commercial advantage." Individual power stations, including Niagara, had now grown to serve areas that could encompass entire states, and not one of them stood alone: each was connected to, and might borrow from, a host of others in an electric grid. The point of generation was often far from the point of demand, and the interlacing corridors of long-distance wires that cut through rough, quiet, country linked farms, cities, and suburbs—places with ever-changing historical realities and interrelationships—in a shared fate.

In each power station, watchers in the command center hunched day and night over consoles, scanning screens, dials, and gauges that monitored turbines and took account of current running back and forth over thousands of miles of lines. Such a network proved economical: "In times of normal demand for electricity the member companies [could] shut down some of their expensive steam-fed facilities and 'ride' on the cheaper current provided by hydroelectric generators." And on the whole, it was more reliable. If, for instance, a generator had to be shut down for maintenance or repair at an eastern Massachusetts station, power could be borrowed from New York or Wisconsin, for there was virtually no electrical distance between them. Power could be generated in New York and travel to New Jersey before arriving in Massachusetts if need be. While all this was being accomplished, people in Boston might notice nothing more than a momentary flicker of their lamps.

But for all the massive reach of electricity, the generation of electric power also stood in the same delicate balance as in 1910, when Edward Hungerford detailed the way a cloud could stress the power systems of New York City, for the need to maintain an equilibrium of supply and demand hadn't changed. There was more at stake, of course. The balance had to be maintained across numerous power stations, and—since electricity moved back and forth across the wires—surges, flow reversals, or disruptions at one power plant could have far-reaching ramifications and might ultimately affect the synchronicity of the entire system.

That synchronicity was essential. By 1965 all public utility generators east of the Rocky Mountains ran in sync with one another so that alternating current could be seamlessly switched from one generator to another throughout the system. You might think of their working sound as the music of our spheres, for if even one were to fall out of phase and begin spinning at its own speed, if its steady, precise humming became discordant—a wobbly song of its own—well, then...

A slight variation [could] be tolerated if it [was] soon brought into line. A major variation [would force] other generators to "hunt" for a new phase more aligned to the maverick's.... The out-of-phase current finally [would cause] other generators on the circuit to shut down. The more generators that cut off, the more that [would] follow suit. For any generator feeding current into the system at that point would be so overloaded that its safety devices, the circuit breakers, would bring it to a halt.

What goes on across the power grid, it's said, "is like a game of tug of war, which works as long as neither side—the generating stations and the load centers—wins. If one side falters, and the rope moves too far, everyone on the other side will fall down."

All through the brief daylight hours of November 9, 1965, the forty-two interconnected power stations between Ontario and Boston that made up the Canadian and U.S. Eastern Interconnection hummed along. There were no extraordinary demands on the supply: the weather was mild and the sky clear. As the sun set shortly before five o'clock, farmers in the countryside, with their fields all plowed under and their barns full of hay, were beginning the evening milking. In small towns, stores flipped over their Open signs and closed up shop. Everywhere, wives and mothers began preparing dinner while children sat transfixed in front of the TV watching
The Three Stooges.
City office workers, their day done, jammed the elevators, subways, escalators, streets, and trains. Car lights formed brilliant rivers down avenues and across bridges, their drivers obeying, anticipating, or trying to beat the red, amber, and green signals that had been directing the flow of traffic ever since the first four-way, three-color stoplights—based on controls used by railroads—were devised in the 1920s.

Nowhere were more people in transit than in New York City, when, at 5:16
P.M.,
more than three hundred miles to the north, at the Sir Adam Beck No. 2 generating station in Ontario, a relay—a device about the size of a telephone of the time which automatically regulated and directed the flow of current—failed to give off the proper signal. As a result, a circuit breaker did not open, which caused excess electric current to surge through the system. According to John Wilford and Richard Shepard,

Because the relay did not work, there was an overload on the line. This caused relays on other lines feeding through the plant to operate circuit breakers and the total of 1.6 million kilowatts going through the Beck station suddenly reversed course—as electricity will do when it is unable to flow in the direction it is supposed to.

Much of all this vast quantity of electric current raced back across upper New York State, tripping safety equipment from Rochester to Boston and points beyond. At this point the second phase in the breakdown occurred. Consolidated Edison in New York City, and other power companies to the south that had been receiving power from the area knocked out of service by the power surge, were hit by a reverse flow in their own lines. Their power rushed, somewhat as air will rush to fill a vacuum, into the upstate New York—New England—Ontario region. The generators in New York City and elsewhere, inadequate to fill the huge power vacuum, automatically shut themselves off.