It's a poor history of lighting. They missed the incandescent lamp mantle, the limelight, and the arc light. That's when light output finally got serious. Gas lamps were dim, and generated more heat than light. You need more than just a flame. You need to get up to incandescence temperature.
The arc light changed cities from dark to bright.[1] Suddenly, for the first time in history, major city streets were brilliantly lit. If someone had been able to see the earth from space, for the first time there would be lights at night.
Arc street lights worked fine. Way too much light for your house, of course.
Arc lights remain a thing, but today the arc is run in xenon or sodium vapor rather than air.
Arc lights also enabled fascism in the early 20th century. A spectacle like the Cathedral of Light and the new technologies used by the Nazi party were transformative in terms of mass rallying:
There are many historians that would agree with this. Technology availability and adoption is definitely an input into the equation determining the types of social organization that are possible.
One accessible example is that Federal power in the US really took off post-Civil War. Part of this story is that the war had greatly expanded the size and power of the Federal government, as well as weakening the old slaveocracy, but another is that centralized control of a territory as vast as the US basically requires telegraphs and railroads. Even if there were a political appetite for centralization in 1810s America, it just wasn't possible except where existing lines of communication were already adequate (coastal cities and those on major navigable waterways or canals).
I don't think that's a controversial thesis at all.
The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters specifically cited cars and industrialization among its main inspirations, and both Mussolini and Hitler largely garnered public support from their opposition to Communism. Communism was profoundly a response to industrialization. Moreover, the kind of state regimentation that was central to authoritarianism of all kinds, including Fascism, would have been impossible without cars and impossible without industrialization.
Fascism without cars or industrialization would have had nothing in common with the Fascism we actually got.
I mean yeah - there was a very interesting article recently about the usage of the airplane for political rallying used by Hitler and how ahead of time it was for him to tour the country with stopovers in it's entirety in just a matter of days.
It's a poor history of lighting. They missed the incandescent lamp mantle, the limelight, and the arc light. That's when light output finally got serious. Gas lamps were dim, and generated more heat than light. You need more than just a flame. You need to get up to incandescence temperature.
The arc light changed cities from dark to bright.[1] Suddenly, for the first time in history, major city streets were brilliantly lit. If someone had been able to see the earth from space, for the first time there would be lights at night.
Arc street lights worked fine. Way too much light for your house, of course. Arc lights remain a thing, but today the arc is run in xenon or sodium vapor rather than air.
Incandescent lamps came later.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcpS_Vz0BiA