A moonlight tower or moontower is a lighting structure designed to illuminate areas of a town or city at night. The towers were popular in the late 19th century in cities across the United States and Europe; they were most common in the 1880s and 1890s. In some places they were used when standard street-lighting, using smaller, shorter, and more numerous lamps, was 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.
Austin, Texas
, is the only city in the world known to still have moonlight towers. They are tall with foundations wide. The towers were manufactured in Indiana by Fort Wayne Electric Company and assembled on site. In 1894, the City of Austin purchased 31 used towers from Detroit. A single tower cast light from six carbon arc lamps, illuminating a radius circle brightly enough to read a watch. In 1993, the city of Austin dismantled the towers and restored every bolt, turnbuckle and guy-wire as part of a $1.3 million project, the completion of which was celebrated in 1995 with a citywide festival.
Detroit
, had a particularly extensive system of light towers inaugurated in 1882 with 122 towers, tall and apart downtown, shorter, less powerful, and twice as far apart elsewhere. The towers were masts secured with cables and were maintained daily by crew who hauled themselves to the top using a counterweighted elevator. The system covered about, but soon had to be supplemented with incandescent lighting in the city center, partly because trees interfered with the light, and by the turn of the century they remained only in Cadillac Square; the towers were soon removed there, too.
Towers were erected in New Orleans, Louisiana, starting in the early 1880s. One set of towers illuminated a section of the Mississippi River levee, aiding in loading and unloading ships at night in the busy port. A tower at the busy intersection of Canal Street, Bourbon Street, and Carondelet Street was constructed with a set of four water pipes to aid in fire-fighting in the nearby multi-story buildings.
In 1881, a -tall tower was erected spanning the intersection of Santa Clara and Market streets in San Jose, California, making it the first city to be illuminated by electric light west of the Rocky Mountains. James Jerome Owens, publisher of the San Jose Mercury, came up with the idea for the tower after visiting the first electrical lighting station in San Francisco in 1879. The tower collapsed in a storm on December 3, 1915. In 1977, a nearly half-sized replica, tall, was constructed at the San Jose Historical Museum.
Wabash, Indiana
, was the first city to use arc lamps: four mounted on the city hall dome, turned on on March 31, 1880. Wabash used a self-regulating lamp invented by Charles Brush in 1870.
