History of Street lighting in the U.S.

After the invention of gas light by William Murdoch in 1792, cities in Britain began to light their streets using gas. The United States followed suit shortly afterwards with the introduction of gas lighting to the streets of Baltimore in 1816. Throughout the nineteenth century, the use of gas lighting increased. Some locations in the United States still use gas lights; see Gas lighting.
After Edison pioneered electric use, light bulbs were developed for the streetlights as well. The first city to use electric street lights was Wabash, Indiana. Charles F. Brush of Cleveland, Ohio wanted to publicly test his new invention the "Brush Light" and needed a city to do so. The City Council of Wabash agreed to testing the lights and on March 31, 1880, Wabash became the "Third Electrically Lighted City in the World" as a flood of light engulfed the town from four Brush Lights mounted on top of the courthouse. People can still see one of the original Brush Lights on display at the Wabash County Courthouse.^[2] By the beginning of the 20th century, the number of fire-based streetlights was dwindling as developers were searching for safer and more effective ways to illuminate their streets. Fluorescent and incandescent lights became very popular during the 1930s and 1940s, when automobile travel began to flourish. A street with lights was referred to as a white way during the early 20th century; part of New York City's Broadway was nicknamed the Great White Way due to the massive number of electric lights used on theater marquees lining the street.

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History of street lighting in the United States

from Wikipedia. 

note: There were a whole lot less street lights of every kind anywhere I went during the 1950s. So, often when you drove through a town the town wasn't lighted very much except for a theater marquees and the biggest Restaurants in towns and some Shopping Stores. I don't think there were many Supermarkets yet except in the biggest cities. Back then Mom and Pop stores were everywhere in every town more until you began to see things like 7-11 stores and K-marts and chains like that pop up one by one. Change came very gradual some places my parents and I visited in California by car and throughout Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. Sometimes, when we visited remote places it was sometimes as if we were, except for paved roads back in the 1800s and early 1900s in many many ways. Sometimes this was kind of spooky for me as a kid in the 1950s. But, as education through High School became more normal by the early 1960s and then by the end of the Viet Nam War going to college some was something almost everyone did, people became less provincial in general and some became less ethnocentric than they used to be in the U.S.

I think after having traveled the world a lot that the U.S. , Russia, and China are three of the most ethnocentric countries on earth. And where people tend to be the most this way in all countries is away from the oceans and towards the centers of large countries and out in the country away from large cities and airports like the three countries above. When you are raised on an ocean it makes you of necessity more international in your thinking because you are always being exposed to people from other countries. Though this is now changing now that air travel is less expensive than it once was relative the average person's income worldwide  including here in the U.S. So now more people have an international point of view than before when I grew up.  So, from traveling, Television, Internet, magazines and meeting people from other countries, more and more people are developing a more international point of view which I think is very healthy and will probably lead to less wars around the world in both the short and long run. Because when people understand each other better they tend to have less conflicts in general.