Electric lighting has revolutionised our lives by illuminating our homes, streets, and cities. It was only after the end of the First World War that electricity began to find its way into most of our UK homes. Rolling out electricity supply across the country took time. In 1919 only 6% of homes were wired up, and it took until the late 1930s for this number to grow to ~66%. By then all new homes in urban areas were being built with electric lighting as standard. How things have changed since! Today the flick of a switch, a tap on an app, or a voice command will light up rooms in our home providing instant artificial light for reading, cooking, and hobbies even on the darkest of nights. It’s something we take for granted today, largely oblivious to the fact that light at the flick of a switch was an unthinkable luxury for the vast majority of people a century ago.
Lighting our homes, community, and city streets has become more high-tech today than ever before. Streetlights come on when it gets dark, help to keep road users and pedestrians safe and secure, and help to extend our activities outdoors. However, they have downsides. Light pollution from urban areas is one of them, as we can readily see in images taken by satellites and astronauts. There’s always a glow on the horizon which dilutes the visibility of stars in the night sky when walking through suburbs after dark. Furthermore, street lighting’s energy consumption is a matter of global concern because lighting accounts for ~19% of global electricity usage. With resources limited, climate change, and the world’s population forecast to be largely urban by mid-century, it’s not a surprise that ‘smart street lighting’ has progressed over the last two decades.
‘Smart street lighting’ – a connected, sensor-heavy, lighting system allowing individual or groups of lights to be controlled remotely in real time – enables public areas and thoroughfares to be lit more considerately based on their use. Motion detectors, for example, mean that areas can be lit only when people or moving vehicles are present. It’s energy efficient, climate friendly, sustainable and a component within the broader umbrella of ‘smart cities’. At the heart of ‘smart street lighting’ is a fundamental capability, namely the ability to communicate data between disparate and spatially separate entities – an ability which has been at the heart of technological progress for many, many, many decades.
‘Smart street lighting’ and Voyager 1, currently 15 billion miles from Earth in deep space, thus have something in common – both fundamentally need to communicate information to be useful. They are not only both testament to the talent of the scientists and engineers of their eras, but also to the fact that communication in one form or another has always been at the heart of everything in our lives…
