Lamp Posts

Lamp posts have been around for hundreds of years; as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there are reports that inns and various kinds of buildings were required to have lanterns outside their doors at night and keep them lit so that travelers could find their way. This could be one of the earliest examples of what we now think of today as the lamp post. Lamp posts continued to further develop using different kinds of technology with some of the most readily recognizable lamp posts coming into existence in the early nineteenth century with the invention of the gas light. Lamp post lighting was used in Pall Mall, London and the era of public gas lighting and old style street lamps began (before which, wooden lamp posts from which lanterns would be hung would have been the norm, although more associated with specific buildings in many cases than with public lighting).

Lamp post lighting was originally used primarily in commercial and business areas of cities, but as time went on and electric street lamp posts became the widespread form of outdoor lamp posts, lamp posts in residential areas became more common. Today, the outdoor lamp post is a common feature of any urban landscape and we tend not to think too much of it, unless we are looking at a particular variant of lamp posts such as the nautical post lamp or the solar post light. The modern lamp post tends to be very high - high enough that it is difficult for the lighting element in the lamp to be broken (or fixed, except by special crews with ladder vehicles) and to provide a strong halogen or incandescent light that covers a wide area.

The solar lamp post is one of the latest kinds of lamp posts that has been developed to meet the perception of a greater need for ecological and environmentally sound ways of lighting: a solar lamp post light has a solar light post cap that collects solar energy during the day and uses it as the sun dims and finally goes down to continue running the light through the night. The solar post top light / solar fence post light may also be hooked into the local power grid to provide reliability on days when there isn't much sunlight (for example, during the winter months) or on days when there are a lot of clouds and not that much energy to be converted.