Light Outside the Clement House

Electric light could announce itself from a building's front rather than from a generating station. In its September 21, 1883 issue, the Sunbury Weekly News reported that Burrell of the Clement House had extended a thirty-two-candlepower electric lamp from the front of the building, throwing light around the neighborhood.

The notice made the lamp's effect on the street its point of interest. It described electric lighting in Shamokin as successful and being adopted rapidly. That was the newspaper's contemporary impression, not a count of connected customers or a measurement of every lamp in town.

The little report does not name the lamp's supplier or establish the day it was installed. Its scene is more specific: by the time of publication, readers were being told about a visible electric light at the Clement House. A new technology was becoming part of the neighborhood through an individual building and the light it cast beyond its doors.