I walk with Fernando and Jessica through the halls of the Federated College of Engineers and Architects of Costa Rica, in Curridabat. We arrive at a small central courtyard where a luminary shines, intact. It is an object that shows the refinement of another century. A vestige of the first electric flashes that illuminated the nights of San José.
“It’s one of the first twenty-five,” Fernando tells me. The phrase is enough for this small encapsulated sun to ignite stories and wonders, like a spark. The luminaire is at the same time history, material and imagination. A valuable object for what it counts. An open door to the time when the streets of San José began to be transformed.
A luminous history
Long before electricity became commonplace, St. Joseph lit up his nights gropingly. In 1840, when it was a village with aspirations of a city, lanterns with tallow candles were installed. Its trembling light seemed always about to be extinguished. Then came, in 1856, the canfin lamps, an advance barely enough to scare away the shadows and prolong the gathering. The night then had immense power over us.
But in 1879, in the city of Menlo Park, California, Thomas Alva Edison turned on the light bulb that changed the course of history. Its flash spread and lit up the imagination of the city of San José, which soon heard that call, even though it was only the capital of a province of 50,000 inhabitants.
On August 9, 1884, Manuel Víctor Dengo and Luis Batres inaugurated a hydroelectric plant near the National Liquor Factory. That night, twenty-five luminaires were lit between the plant and the Central Park and President Prospero Fernández witnessed the prodigy from the balcony of the Presidential Palace. From Alajuela, Cartago and Heredia crowds came to witness this new way of dawning.
The chronicler Alberto Quijano wrote decades later, in his book Costa Rica ayer y hoy (1939): “The streets where the posts were placed and the wires were laid, were a place of obligatory pilgrimage for everyone… some came expressing their doubts because, perhaps, the wires were hollow, like very fine tubes, through which the lampposts circulated.”
That’s how new electricity was. That’s how amazing his arrival was. San José, with its small-town life, became one of the first capitals in the world to have electric lighting.
A stubborn firefly
I look at the luminary as if contemplating a relic. I think of the hands that placed it, of the expectation of those first neighbors and of the city that then moved between markets and carts. Since then, the luminaire has seen buildings emerge and witnessed the passing of generations. It has resisted, like a stubborn firefly.
In times when electricity is turned on with a switch and used without thinking, this beautiful antique reminds us that every flash has a cost and that light is a conquest that requires effort and foresight. Their original bulbs had a much shorter life. They had to be brought by boat, installed carefully and managed rigorously, so there was no room for waste.
Each hour lit was a ceremonial act that pointed out the fragility of resources and the need to take care of them. This idea is very pertinent at a time of year when another “Black Friday” is approaching
The luminaire does not know planned obsolescence, that cruel logic that has turned our objects into disposable flickers. It remains lit as a lesson in perseverance. As a reminder that lasting is also possible. Who designs now with the desire to stay? What contemporary artifact will be able to tell its story a hundred years from now?
The luminary tells us about the amazement we sometimes feel in the face of novelty and the care we must take in the face of what we take for granted. He tells us that there was a time when everything depended on a small burning filament that we know, not by chance, as resistance. Resisting and illuminating are essential gestures in our days.
In its discreet radiance, the luminaire confirms the value of those who, like Fernando and Jessica, know the hidden language of objects. Perhaps true progress does not consist in multiplying the lights, but in learning to care for and to see with gratitude those that still resist.