Every evening, a man walked the streets lighting gas lamps one by one until electricity arrived.
The lamplighter was a municipal worker whose job was to walk a designated route at dusk, lighting the oil or gas lamps that illuminated city streets, and returning at dawn to extinguish them. The role emerged in the seventeenth century as European cities began implementing public street lighting.1 Paris introduced oil lamps on its major streets in 1667 under the direction of Louis XIV's lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie.2
London followed with oil lamps in the early 1700s. By the 1810s, gas lighting had arrived. London's Pall Mall was illuminated by gas in 1812, and within a few decades, gas lamplighters had become a fixture of urban life across Europe and the Americas.1
The job required specific tools, typically a long pole with a wick for lighting and a cap for extinguishing, and intimate knowledge of the route. A single lamplighter might tend several hundred lamps per shift.
The arrival of electric street lighting in the 1880s made the lamplighter obsolete within a generation. The transition was neither sudden nor uniform. Some cities maintained gas lamps into the early twentieth century, and lamplighters continued working wherever gas infrastructure remained.3
Robert Louis Stevenson, whose childhood home in Edinburgh was lit by gas lamps, wrote the poem "The Lamplighter" in 1885, describing the figure as a source of comfort in the darkness.4 The profession became a standard example of technological displacement, cited whenever new inventions rendered an entire category of work unnecessary.