Moonlight tower
structure to emit significant light over an urban area
A moonlight tower or moontower is a lighting structure designed to illuminate areas of a town or city at night. Only the collection of towers in Austin, Texas, have been termed historically "moonlight towers," a term that dates to the mid-20th century. The light from the towers was compared to moonlight, after they were installed in 1895.
The towers were most prevalent during the late 19th century in cities across the United States. They were most common during the 1880s and 1890s. In some places they were used when standard street-lighting (using smaller, shorter, and more numerous lamps) was deemed impractically expensive. In other places they were used in addition to gas street lighting. The towers were designed to illuminate areas often of several blocks at once, on the "high light" principle. Arc lamps, known for their exceptionally bright and harsh light, were the most common method of illumination. As incandescent electric street lighting became common, the prevalence of towers began to wane.
The public source identifies “Moonlight tower” as structure to emit significant light over an urban area. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Moonlight, tower and structure.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moonlight tower” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.