When did we stop thinking that sunset marked the end of the day? Not as long ago as you might think: I am old enough to remember staying on a family farm where evening light came only from kerosene lamps and a home-made diesel generator that charged a stack of clapped-out car batteries. The generator was too noisy to run at night, and by morning the batteries could manage only a dim red glow. As a city child, I loved the romance of it all – the smell of kerosene still evokes warm memories – but Auntie Mabel no doubt couldn’t wait to get connected to the electrical grid. Proper electric light meant progress, status – and a lot less work.

Author Jane Brox has written several books about how farm life has changed over the centuries, and in Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light she is interested above all in the intimate relationship between light and human possibilities. The result is a book that focuses on the social changes brought about by lighting technology rather on than the technical developments themselves. Short on technical detail and sometimes muddled about the engineering, it is long on human stories related to artificial light.

The plan is chronological, with attention devoted about equally to Europe and the US. We start in the caves of Lascaux, in southwest France, where startling images drawn by prehistoric humans present an immediate problem: how did they see to create them? Answer: limestone saucers found there were probably filled with oil or fat to fuel a luminous flame. This might have been a good point at which to answer another question: why are flames luminous? But Brox is not interested in this kind of thing. She is not a scientist, and the few technical explanations scattered through the book, as well as being distinctly odd in places (confusing motors with generators for instance), have a slightly bolted-on feel, as if reluctantly inserted at the insistence of an editor.

Brox is good, however, at conveying the extraordinarily long time during which flames were (with the exception of oddities such as fireflies and rotting fish) the only source of light after the Sun had set. And also the fact that for nearly all of this time these flames were provided by burning fat or oil, just as they were in prehistoric times. There were a few footling improvements along the way: Aimé Argand’s hollow wick, invented in the late 18th century, burned fuel more efficiently; smelly whale oil (cue long passage about the heroism and wickedness of whaling) was replaced by relatively clean kerosene. But it was only when liquid fuels gave way to gas that anything approaching the amount of light we expect today could be achieved at an affordable price.

Once gas began to be piped to cities in the early 19th century, things changed quickly. Very soon, after 40,000 years of stasis, we had not one but two new kinds of light producers: electricity as well as gas. Brox documents the emergence of electric lighting dramatically, capturing the excitement of the AC/DC wars between Westinghouse and Edison, the harnessing of Niagara Falls and the expansion of the US grid into rural areas (aided by the federal government in a way that might now seem unacceptably socialist). Later, the US would pay a heavy price for the hasty and chaotic development of its grid, with blackouts starting in the 1960s and continuing to this day.

It is a curious fact that although lighting accounts for only about 10% of electrical demand, failure of the electricity supply is nearly always called a “blackout”. It seems we fear loss of light more than loss of power. Nevertheless, a total, intentional, blackout was instituted in Britain in 1939 as the Second World War began, soon to be followed by blackouts of a different kind as the electrical systems of its cities were knocked sideways by bombing. Brox describes the London blitz vividly and sympathetically, though once again her tendency to concentrate on the dramatic and personal at the expense of her advertised subject rather gets the better of her.

Brilliant is an entertaining and thought-provoking book about a relatively neglected subject. It is beautifully written, if occasionally veering a bit close to the poetry of Walt Whitman, with Brox’s “…in the midst of the old quiet, where light had circumference again” faintly echoing lines such as “There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.” The book is not comprehensive: some important areas, such as vehicle lighting, are left out. On the other hand, it does tackle some of the problems thrown up by abundant artificial light: the dimming of stars, the disorientation of birds and, of course, the apparently unstoppable production of carbon dioxide by countless power stations.

Brox takes us up to the present day and even into that betting shop of popular science, the future, where we find clothes made from fabrics that store energy during the day and release it via LEDs after dark. She is on more secure ground discussing compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and on-going consumer resistance to their unfriendly light. Once again, a bit more science would have helped here, contrasting the jagged spectrum of CFLs with the smooth, black-body radiation of a good old-fashioned light bulb.

While not as scholarly as Carolyn Marvin’s comparable classic When Old Technologies Were New (Oxford University Press, 1990), Brox’s book is equipped with a very full set of notes. And like any really serious book, it provides no pictures. As a result, it is not altogether clear who its audience might be, other than that overworked animal the intelligent layreader (perhaps someone who liked Dava Sobell’s more specialized Longitude). But Brilliant did the trick for me. Despite its irritating technical failings, it provided more than a nostalgic whiff of kerosene: an engrossing account of the engineering, entrepreneurial and political heroism that created today’s dangerously light-addicted world.