Wabash, Indiana becomes the first electrically lit city in the world
Poets involved
What happened
On March 31, 1880, the small city of Wabash, Indiana became the first city in the world to be illuminated entirely by electric light when Charles Brush's arc lights were installed above the courthouse square. The four 3,000-candlepower lamps, powered by a Brush dynamo, flooded the town center with brilliant white light visible for miles across the flat Indiana landscape. This dramatic demonstration in a small Midwestern town, rather than a major metropolis, showed that electric lighting was not just for great cities but could transform any community, and Wabash's achievement was reported in newspapers worldwide.
Literary impact
The electrification of Wabash, a small, unremarkable Midwestern town, rather than Paris or London, gave the coming of electric light an American democratic character that resonated in the nation's literature. The image of a tiny Indiana town suddenly bathed in brilliant light, visible for miles across the prairie, became a symbol of the transformative power of technology in American life that would appear in works from Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" to the poetry of Carl Sandburg. Wabash's moment of electrical fame embodied the American literary theme of ordinary places transformed by extraordinary events.
Source: Wikipedia
