Streetlight
A streetlight is a light bulb on a pole used for lighting streets. Streets can be lit for safety or visibility reasons, so people can see where they are going at night.
There are five main types of streetlight:
- An LED streetlight gives a white light, and the lantern is usually short and thin because each LED is small.
- A mercury vapor streetlight gives a green-white light, and the lantern is usually short.
- A metal halide streetlight gives a white light, and the lantern is usually short.
- A low pressure sodium streetlight gives a yellow light. The lantern is usually long, because low-pressure sodium lamps are shaped like a tube.
- A high pressure sodium streetlight gives an orange-white light, and the lantern is usually short.
Many countries are replacing, mercury vapor, metal halide and sodium vapor streetlights with LED streetlights, because LED streetlights are cheaper to run. However, some models integrate the LED panel in a way that the whole lantern must be replaced, if the panel burns out or becomes faulty.
Streetlight Media
Detail of a street light from Paris
Detail of a street light with Cupid, at the Austrian Parliament Building (Vienna)
A lamplighter cleaning a lantern during the Great War
William Murdoch's house in Redruth, UK, the first domestic house in the world to be lit by gas
Streetlights from an 1871 catalog
Demonstration of Yablochkov's arc lamp on the Avenue de l'Opera in Paris (1878), the first form of electric street lighting
Heritage lamp post in the City Botanic Gardens, Brisbane
Map of Tamworth, New South Wales, showing the position of leads and lights along the network of city streets in 1888
The distinctive monochromatic yellow glow from a low-pressure sodium lamp in the UK
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Related pages
- Incandescent bulb, rarely used in streetlights
- Fluorescent bulb
