Aurora, Illinois -- ironically named only in retrospect -- was one of the early places to experiment with artificial moonlight. The town contracted with Charles Francis Brush, an inventor and an entrepreneur and one of Edison's chief competitors in the race to electrify America. In his wonderful book The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, Ernest Freeberg describes what it's like to be a town lit, suddenly, by imitation moons. Brush installed his enormous lights, Freeberg notes, via six iron towers studded across Aurora -- structures "rising like gigantic pencils over the city's rooftops." Stretching high above the skyline, Brush arc lamps provided intense light to the areas directly below them. They also, Freeberg writes, "bathed the surrounding fields and 'lonely outskirts' of the city with something like 'full summer moonlight.'"

In comparison with this display of power, the old gas lamps lining the streets below the towers began to look quaint -- "more decorative," Freeberg writes, "than useful." Light was, suddenly, everywhere, even and especially where nature had not intended it to be. Night became not-night. The day broadened its reach. And joy ensued. One visitor from Chicago described Aurora's citizens to be "in a state of delighted enthusiasm over the splendid practical results." The moonlight towers, he declared, were a "most brilliant success."

But the towers, it turned out, were neither entirely brilliant nor entirely successful. The problem with a singular light source is the singularity: The light comes, inevitably, at an angle. The powerful illumination from one of Aurora's manmade moons could be easily blocked by anything that got in its way, be it a tree or a building or a human body. People complained about the disorienting shadows cast by the arc lights, Freeberg notes. They complained about the jarring effects of walking from day to night in the space of a few footfalls. Brush, aware of this problem, focused his moon tower efforts on Midwestern cities that had the twin virtues of being both geographically flat and designed on a grid, thus mitigating the problem of the angles. Still, it soon became clear that many moons would be required to illuminate even the smallest of towns. "Inevitably," Freeberg writes, engineers "added more towers, replacing a single false moon with a constellation of brilliant stars."

The man-made heavens made their way to Detroit. Aldermen of the city, Freeberg notes, were eager to swath their city in the grandeur that would come with being "the best lighted in the world." They contracted with the Brush Company to erect 70 light towers around the city, each one massive and measuring at least 150 feet in height. Brush, recognizing the publicity that could come with lighting the world's best-lighted city, offered to install the mini-moons at no cost to Detroit -- and, to sweeten the deal, promised to charge the city the same rate for electricity that it was already paying for gas. The arrangement was a business transaction with celestial overtones: Brush promised Detroit and its citizens not just the awe of cities that still toiled in the dark, but "a light equal to first-class moonlight."

During the hot summer of 1882, the installation of the new moon towers became its own kind of brilliant spectacle. People gathered to witness the building of structures that represented Progress and Ingenuity and, in a very real sense, The Future. They also gathered to witness some drama. Since electrical engineers were just learning their trade -- that trade, in Detroit's case, being the erection of 150-foot-tall poles anchoring 500 pounds worth of lights -- accidents were, perhaps, inevitable. And falling towers -- thin metal, plus gravity -- had an uncanny way of slicing through roofs as they toppled toward the ground.