Aurora: The City That First Turned On the Lights

Aurora sits on both banks of the Fox River about thirty-five miles west of Chicago's Loop, and it carries a distinction that most of its two hundred thousand residents know by heart: on the evening of November eighth, eighteen eighty-one, Aurora became the first city in Illinois, and one of the first in the United States, to illuminate its streets with electric lights.

The city was founded in eighteen thirty-four by settlers from New York, laid out on the Fox River where a dam could generate water power for mills. It grew steadily through the eighteen forties and fifties, bolstered by a decisive advantage in the railroad age. In eighteen forty-nine, the Aurora Branch Railroad opened a twelve-mile line connecting Aurora to the main line at West Chicago, making Aurora the second railroad point to serve the young city of Chicago. The full Chicago, Burlington and Quincy connection that followed in eighteen sixty-four put Aurora on the main rail corridor west, and the city grew into a manufacturing center with foundries, railroad car shops, and light industry.

By eighteen eighty, about one-fifth of the city's streets were still in darkness after nightfall. The city's gas-lighting contract expired and the council failed to renew it, leaving Aurora's streets dark for several months in early eighteen eighty-one. A debate broke out over what to replace the gas lamps with. Some aldermen pushed for another gas contract. Others argued for a new technology being tested in other cities: arc electric lamps. The electric camp won. Sixteen arc lamps were installed, each rated at two thousand candlepower, equivalent to the light of one hundred twenty-five gas jets. On November eighth, eighteen eighty-one, the system was switched on for the first time.

The public reaction was largely wonder. The new lights illuminated the streets far more brightly than gas ever had, though some observers complained that the arc towers lit the sky more effectively than they lit the ground directly below. Aurora officially adopted the nickname City of Lights in nineteen oh eight.

Aurora is today Illinois's second-largest city, a diverse community that has grown far beyond its Fox River origins. But on the main commercial streets of its downtown, the phrase City of Lights still appears on markers and storefronts, a reminder that what we take for granted on every street corner in America had to start somewhere, and it started here.