Austin's Moonlight Towers
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This is one of 27 that remain out of 31 towers erected 1894-95 and in continuous use since. Their carbon arc lights then illuminated entire city. Now mercury vapor lamps provide beacons for many miles on roads and airway, from dusk to dawn. Austin is said to be unique in the dramatic method of lighting.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Austin's "moonlight towers" are 165-foot iron structures first raised in 1894–95, when their carbon-arc lamps cast a bluish glow said to light the entire young city at once. The idea of flooding a town with artificial "moonlight" from tall towers was tried in several 19th-century cities, but Austin's are the last surviving system of their kind. Converted over the years to mercury-vapor lamps, more than two dozen of the original towers still burn from dusk to dawn.
Why it matters
These towers are the sole intact survivors of a bold Gilded Age experiment in electric public lighting, a monument to the era when cities first banished the dark.
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