Nation, we offer a tip of the hat to Stephen Colbert for declaring war on the war on Christmas. Our hero is trapped in his mountain cabin by a bear (what else?), unable to get to New York to film A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!, so the musical special comes to him. The self-styled broadcasting legend nails duets with dope-smoking wise man Willie Nelson, Hanukkah evangelist Jon Stewart, authorized prayer technician Feist, and Dickensian busker Elvis Costello. Don't miss the stocking stuffers: a video Advent calendar and book-burning Yule log. Take that, "Happy Holidays."

Hurricanes in the Caribbean, earthquakes in Asia, wildfires in California — Mother Nature's can of whup-ass is set to stun, and it's hard to keep track of where her blows are landing. Which is why this comprehensive natural disaster RSS feed from the New Zealand Herald is such a welcome port in the storm. An exhaustive stream of global devastation is the perfect way to sate our rubbernecking receptors.

Now playing at the new California Academy of Sciences Morrison Planetarium, Fragile Planet provides a fresh perspective on our place in space. Starting in San Francisco and pulling back to the edges of the universe, narrator Sigourney Weaver shows us other worlds that are likely to support life. Exquisitely visualized by vets of ILM, Pixar, and Lucasfilm, the show is jacked into a NASA database, and its universe will be updated whenever a new planet is discovered.

Nonprofit group the Moth revitalizes the oral tradition with true stories told live—no notes allowed. Featuring fave authors like Neil Gaiman and unexpected confessors like ex-pickpocket O. T. Powell, the tales can be harrowing or humorous but always deliver satisfying epiphanies. Our own: What makes a good yarn is not necessarily the story but the storyteller.

Tired of loading podcasts onto your iPod before a trip? Try Lexy. The easy-to-use service sends news and entertainment "quikcasts" to your cell phone. Sign up for free at Lexy.com to build a playlist; use the Share voice command to shoot a clip to a friend. Highlights include NPR's Story of the Day, NASA Feature Stories, Slashdot Review, and, of course, Wired's weekly quikcast.

More art than advertisement, this Web video, directed by Acne Film for Chicago-based designer toy store Rotofugi, is a gem. In this quirky and magical piece, vinyl VIPs like Qee (designed by David Horvath), Gloomy Bear (Chax), and Smiling Malfi (Friends With You) flaunt their treasured "mint, in box" Homo sapiens. It was never released as an actual ad, but you can check it out at Acne.

Finally, a game that breathes new life into the festering cadaver that is the zombie-horror genre. The latest from Valve pits four scrappy humans against hundreds of hyperaggressive corpses. It demands teamwork and coordination and delivers thrills on par with 28 Days Later. Blasting through a zombie horde is pure awesome concentrate, but one killer game mode lets players enlist in the army of the undead. Mmmm, brains.

It's porn for LucasArts junkies. From the lenticular cover (Darth Vader morphs into Monkey Island's Guybrush Threepwood) to a collection of never-before-published Star Wars game logos, this fine-art-style book is manna for fans of the famous game developer. Flip through design documents from the early '80s, study storyboards and scripts for Star Wars: Rebel Assault 2, and preview concept art for the upcoming Indiana Jones game without leaving your basement lair. Power-up: The forward is by George himself.

Each fall, the American Photography organization compiles the year's most powerful editorial images into a single exquisite volume. With brilliant work by the likes of James Nachtwey, Brent Stirton, and Plamen Petkov (right), this one's no exception, but it's also a most stylishly produced visual time capsule. And we're not just saying that because it was designed by Wired creative director Scott Dadich. We really are into naked ladies and fruit.*

* Other things we really are into: the nickname Captain Chaos, puerile Yule log jokes, hot rocket scientists.

The real reason "Live Your Life" is the freshest jam off rapper T.I.'s Paper Trails isn't because of Rihanna's vocals or T.I.'s flow—it's the "Numa Numa" sample. Yep, the 2004 video virus of a pudgy 18-year-old lip-syncing to Moldovan boy band O-Zone has reinfected pop culture. No worries, though—this strain is benign. Ditching the original's Euro-rave vibe, producer Just Blaze tweaked the "mai ai hee" refrain into a midtempo "hey, oh!" party anthem we've had on repeat for weeks.

1894: Norbert Wiener is born in Columbia, Missouri. A child prodigy, he goes on to become one of the 20th century's most famous mathematicians and the founder of the discipline of cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems.

Norbert's father, Leo Wiener, was a lecturer (and later professor) of Slavic languages at Harvard University, where the family moved shortly after Norbert's birth. Leo Wiener's interests, however, were wide-ranging. Leo educated his son at home according to his own eclectic (and harsh) methods, allowing young Norbert full access to his diverse library. The precocious Norbert showed an early aptitude for languages, mathematics and logic — although he later admitted that basic arithmetic caused him trouble.

Wiener graduated from high school and entered Tufts University at age 11. He graduated from Tufts at 14 and then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard at age 18 with a dissertation on mathematical logic.

Wiener continued his studies of mathematics and philosophy at England's Cambridge University, studying with Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, George Santayana and G.H. Hardy, and making the acquaintance of the poet (and fellow Missourian) T.S. Eliot.

Rebuffed from a teaching appointment at Harvard because he was Jewish (despite his father's having been a professor there), Wiener joined the mathematics faculty across town at MIT in 1919. He remained there for a remarkably productive 41 years.

Within a decade of his MIT appointment, Wiener made several enormous contributions to mathematics, including a mathematical explanation of Brownian motion (the random movement of particles in a fluid), a problem Einstein had first explained in terms of the movements of molecules in 1905. Wiener's discovery led to modern probability theory and has implications in understanding many situations where countless tiny inputs produce a single output, from the movements of the Dow Jones averages to the distortions that a noisy line introduces in an electronic signal.

Unlike some mathematicians, Wiener was sympathetic to the engineering applications of his work and focused much attention on providing mathematical foundations to engineering problems, including wave-form analysis, signal theory and noise filtering. He worked on ballistics computations during World War I and on techniques for automatically aiming anti-aircraft guns in World War II.

That latter work led Wiener to a theory of cybernetics, also known as systems theory. Cybernetics is not so much a defined discipline as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of complex systems and how they regulate themselves to remain in equilibrium or on target toward a defined goal. A key notion of cybernetics is the feedback principle, whereby a system constantly adjusts itself based on feedback from the environment and from its prior adjustments. Wiener noticed that this principle is active not only in automation, but also in living creatures.

The word cybernetics derives from the Greek work kybernetes, meaning "helmsman." The verb kybernan, to steer or govern, also gives us (through Latin) words like government, governor and gubernatorial. Cybernetics itself spawned a series of other neologisms, including cyborg, cyberspace, cyberpunk, cybercash, cyberculture, cybersex, and just plain cyber.

Cybernetic theory has been applied to the understanding of biological systems (organisms), ecological systems, neuroscience, society, economics and more, but has arguably had its greatest impact in computers. Wiener's work had a powerful influence on later generations of computer scientists and robotics engineers, including J.C.R. Licklider, a key figure in the early development of the internet.

Despite his fascination with cybernetics and robotics, Wiener was also a critic of automation, warning that it would lead to widespread unemployment. In later years, he also feared that the increasing power of computers would some day lead to a devaluing of human intellect.

Wiener achieved so much fame during his lifetime that he was widely recognized beyond academia, and his likeness was even used on billboards. The quintessential absent-minded professor, he was a cheerful and lively conversationalist but left something to be desired as a lecturer. His discoveries put MIT on the map as a first-rate mathematics institution, and his personality and interdisciplinary way of working helped establish MIT's distinctively collaborative culture.

He retired from MIT in 1960, and President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the National Medal of Science in 1964.

Wiener died just a few weeks later, in Stockholm, on March 18, 1964. An obituary for Wiener in Time attributed the following "gospel" to the pioneering mathematician and humanist:

"Render unto man the things that are man's, and unto the computer only the things that are the computer's."

Sources: International Society for Systems Sciences biography, the American Mathematical Society biography (.pdf), the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive and Tufts University, others.

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time of getting together with family and friends, cooking a delicious feast and showing off one's most over-the-top kitchen gadgets.

Forget the perfect garlic press you bought two years ago. The rabbit-ear cork puller? Passé. What you need to make this Thanksgiving special is, of course, some new, high-tech cooking gear. Read on for the top picks from Wired.com's Gadget Lab.

Left:

Frontgate Oil-Less Turkey Fryer

What’s the trick to a flawless Thanksgiving? Deep-frying a turkey to deliciousness without burning down your house and immolating your family in the process. Stop structure fires and spare your loved ones from third-degree burns with the Frontgate Oil-Less Turkey Fryer. This contraption uses propane heat, "infrared cooking technology" and not an ounce of oil to fry your favorite flightless bird to juicy completion.

$200, frontgate.com

Hotshot chefs like Thomas Keller (and Wired's Neil Gellar) are proponents of the sous vide cooking method: That's French for "under vacuum," and it refers to a process of cooking vacuum-sealed food at very low temperatures. Impress your guests with dishes made with devices like Clifton's Food Range, which uses a combination of low pressure and low cooking temperatures to slowly imbue vittles with unparalleled flavor and texture. Stuffing sous vide? There's a dish we can definitely, uh, gobble up.

$700 and up, cliftonfoodrange.co.uk

If you want to give your turkey a smoky flavor this Thanksgiving, there's a much better option than locking it in a closet with your cigar-smoking Uncle Raul. With PolyScience's Smoking Gun, you can flavor virtually any food item by directly infusing it with smoke in a single shot, or you can trap the smoke in a bag to marinate meats and create more enduring aromas.

The Smoking Gun uses a pipe bowl to burn chunks of flavored sawdust. Once lit, an internal fan sucks air from the bowl and pushes the smoke out though the plastic barrel. The gun comes with a few chips of mesquite sawdust, but you can use a burr grinder to make your own woody flavors from whatever wood you like.

The best thing about the Smoking Gun is that it's relatively cheap at $50. The downside is that anyone can buy it, and we're sure not everyone has enough responsibility to take care of a contraption that sets fire to wood (or other cellulose substances — we're just saying) for the sole purpose of creating smoke.

$50, cuisinetechnology.com

The challenge of following a cookbook recipe is getting the execution and timing right while reading tiny, sauce-stained words on a page. The miBook, a portable video player, aims to solve that problem. The device comes preloaded with cooking video guides, walking you through recipes and stopping automatically after each step, giving you time to do what you just saw. If the company put Giada de Laurentiis clips on this gadget, I can guarantee it would have more male customers than female.

$130, mibook.com

The Spice Gun is a chef's deadliest weapon. You load the gun in the revolver with your spice bottles as if they were bullets; pulling the trigger shoots a burst of flavor into your dish. Pepper? Blam. Basil? Bang! Paprika? Kapow! Awesome — it'd probably be an effective weapon for torturing Guantánamo Bay prisoners, too. It's a shame the gun's still just a concept design. But maybe if we wish hard enough we'll be tucking this bad boy under our apron strings one day.

Not yet available, designboom.com

It's never advisable to place your whole hand in a fire, but the promise of a rich, juicy, deep-fried turkey will make otherwise smart people do really stupid things.

Enter the Litwin Turkey-Frying Safety System. This rig is a locking attachment used with turkey deep fryers (of 30 to 40 quarts). It holds the bird upside down as you crank it down into the oil. This is not only safer than trying to chuck it in by hand but also allows the cook to prepare the rest of the feast without worrying that the turkey will fall neck first into the fryer.

$50, litwinsafetysystem.com

If you're especially nervous about food-borne bacteria, this food sanitizer will put most of your fears to rest. The CulinaryPrep mixes up citric acid and basic salt powders (at $2 a package) with water in a washing machine/vacuum-style contraption that kills 99.5 percent of all food bacteria.

You can put in everything from chicken to fish (except chopped meat), and can even use the tumbler to marinate foods and speed up the prep process. Granted, it takes up quite a bit of space on the counter and its price is a bit steep given the state of the economy, but it might just be worth it: With this on your counter, you can rest easy about your food and go back to worrying about the germs on doorknobs.

$350, culinaryprep.com

Like magicians, experienced cooks can measure the temperature of a pan with the wave of a hand. But beginning chefs — and the extremely neurotic — will appreciate that ThinkGeek's pan has a digital thermometer built into it, along with a digital readout on the handle. Cooking is an art, sure — but it's a science too, meaning precision is key.

$50, thinkgeek.com

Yeah, you could be boring and toss your yams into a standard blender to puree them. Or you can bring the fight to the food with a device like the Immersion Blender. Basically the lovechild of a handheld drill and a Cuisinart, this 9-volt portable blender can chop, dice, slice or grind virtually any foodstuff you have at the ready.

$100, brevilleusa.com

Those Oakleys are so last year. For Thanksgiving, these onion goggles are the way to go with their hip wraparound frame. The idea is to help ward off the sulfuric compounds that sting and tear up your eyes when you're peeling and chopping onions. With fog-free clear lenses, they are handy for most kitchen prep work. It may sound hard to believe, but even Consumer Reports gave these specs a qualified recommendation. And when you're done, maybe you can even step out in them and start a new fashion trend. Then again, maybe not.

$20, rsvp-intl.com

Carving the bird is a job that few people look forward to. But if you are the man of the house and need to step up, then it's a good idea to be armed with an electric knife. The power tool promises to produce no-mess thin slices. Bonus: You can hold it menacingly when Uncle Jimmy and the rest of the family are driving you crazy.

$50, cuisinart.com

Sure, you are a great cook. Proof? The pie in the oven, the stuffing in the baking pan and the potatoes boiling on the stovetop. But occasionally — just maybe — something happens and you forget to take the pie out soon enough, the stuffing burns and the potatoes boil over. Suddenly, your Thanksgiving meal is toast. Worse, it's on fire. It's situations like this one when you need a handy — and stylish! — fire extinguisher like this one to put the blaze out in a hurry. And when you are done, head to Denny's.

$30, homehero.com

Microsoft, Ozzie wrote, had to think and operate more like an Internet company and, as much as possible, like a Web startup. Consider ad-supported or subscription business models, he advised, viral distribution, and experiences that "just work." Instead of the clunkiness that Microsoft products so often displayed, focus on being "seamless." Bottom line: Change big-time, or else.

"We were clearly marching along some of those directions, but we were taking an incremental approach," says John Shewchuk, a Microsoft technical fellow who would become an Ozzie lieutenant. "Ray pulled it together in a comprehensive vision."

"It was a big and important memo," says Ballmer, who feels that the Ozzie dispatch called for even tougher adjustments than Gates did in 1995. "The Internet didn't require a change in business practices, just technology changes," Ballmer says. "The notion of moving toward more subscription-based models, more ad-based models, is a bigger change for more people."

The memo didn't get immediate results. Basically, Microsoft couldn't consider a paradigm transplant until Vista and Office shipped. Ozzie was undaunted. "I kept talking," he says. "I began incubating certain things, certain new projects off to the side." While a number of Gates' duties were passed to others (notably to chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie, who was happy to make public appearances as Microsoft's tech ambassador), Ozzie took on some of Gates' product reviews and strategy functions while quietly building a team to implement the ideas in his memo. That team included some key personnel from Ozzie's previous enterprises. "The reason I'm here is Ray," George Moromisato says. "I just believe in his vision." Jack Ozzie, Ray's brother and Groove cofounder, also came along.

Getting the best and brightest at Microsoft to leave their sinecures and join Ozzie's team was more of a challenge, but Ballmer's active involvement helped land the bigger fish. "I'm not going to break your arm to do this job," he told VP David Treadwell. "But I'm going to twist it pretty hard." Treadwell spared himself injury by becoming a key member of Ozzie's operation, heading up a team called Windows Live Core.

Ozzie spent a lot of time crafting a different kind of work environment at Microsoft. "He was very intentional about getting stuff done quickly, focusing on the end customer," Treadwell says. Previously, a big part of any development team at Microsoft was making sure its new product worked in lockstep with everything else the company produced. This "unification" criterion was something that Gates had always hammered on. But Ozzie saw that while that approach avoided annoying conflicts, it also tended to smother innovation in the cradle. "This philosophy of independent innovation—really making progress before you pursue serious integration, is something Ray pushed very strongly," Treadwell says. Ozzie's approach was to encourage people to rush ahead and build things. Then he'd have a team of what he calls the spacklers fill in the gaps and get things ready for release.

In a sense, his teams were cultural pioneers modeling a more flexible, startup style of software development. As a signal of his new approach, Ozzie spent a lot of time on the physical workspace for his team. "I'm either at 1 inch or 30,000 feet," he says. "If there's something I care about, I'm on it." He had workers rip down the labyrinthine, catacomb-like corridors on one floor of a building on the Red West campus and called in architects to create a more open design. Now, walking into the Windows Live Core group is like leaving Microsoft and visiting a Futurama set. Office windows open onto hallways so that quick eye contact can trigger spontaneous discussions. Whiteboards are everywhere. Pool tables, mini-lounges, and snack zones draw people toward the center of the space rather than isolating them around the edges.

At first, the skunk works-like nature of Ozzie's operation engendered suspicion and resentment. "There was a perception of 'Who are these special guys off in their own little space working for this new guy?' That created some tension," Treadwell says. By breaking seldom-questioned rules of how space should be apportioned in the Redmond Borg, Ozzie was pushing against the battleship mentality. Management experts might appreciate his explanation of exactly who was putting up the resistance. "The company," he says. Who's that? "They. You know—Microsoft."

Ozzie acted less like an executive dispatching his duties per the org chart and more like a startup CEO in touch with every aspect of the process. "At first, people go, 'Whoa, what is this—are you a product manager? Are you a developer?'" Jack Ozzie says. "Then they warm up, and man, they just want to be part of the team he's leading." That's fine for the groups he spends time with, but will it scale? "None of that can happen overnight," Jack says. "It's going to have to spread from the people who work for him." Also essential, Jack adds, is whether Ozzie's teams actually deliver: "We're a very results-oriented culture here."

The Ozzie project that must deliver results is Microsoft's so-called operating system for the cloud. As more apps become Web-based, the raison d'être for Windows—running programs on desktop PCs—becomes less compelling. What better way to make up for the decreasing importance of a desktop operating system than to create a dominant OS that runs services in the cloud? This is not only a crucial effort but one in which Microsoft is playing catch-up: Amazon.com went live with its cloud services in early 2006 and now hosts data storage or applications for more than 400,000 developers, including the complete historical archives of The New York Times. Google's entire company is based on the premise that people want to move from desktop to cumulus. But Microsoft hopes to use its cloud OS (codenamed Red Dog, now called Windows Azure) to dominate the cloud the way DOS and Windows did the desktop.

Ozzie found his project lead for Red Dog in Microsoft veteran Amitabh Srivastava, a top computer scientist who had been pulled from Microsoft Research to fix the engineering process for the troubled Vista. Their first meeting, at Ballmer's urging, was set for 4:45, which implied a hard stop after an hour or so. "One of the rules in my family is that nobody misses dinner," Srivastava says. But when Ozzie came in, the two chattered like magpies, and sometime after 8 Srivastava realized that he had indeed missed the evening meal.

Srivastava agreed to head Ozzie's Cloud OS project once Vista was done. His first coup was getting Dave Cutler to come out of semiretirement to join him on the project. At age 66, Cutler is a legendary figure in computing. He wrote the groundbreaking VMS operating system for DEC and later led the team that created Windows NT. An irascible, impatient combination of John von Neumann and Sgt. Rock, his presence on the team gave it instant credibility. Srivastava and Cutler began by methodically visiting every Microsoft group working on services, from Xbox Live to Virtual Earth. In December 2006, Srivastava wrote his own vision document outlining the plan. Its title? "Owning Clouds."

Under Ozzie, Srivastava felt free to create Red Dog using methods not normally seen at Microsoft. He set up his own 1,000-machine data center right in the middle of the Redmond campus to test early versions. To power the operation, the team stole excess reserve power from three nearby buildings. No permissions were sought through Ballmer or Gates. "I take direction from only one person—Ray," Srivastava says. Another indication of the rebel nature of the project comes from its codename. "The official story is that we are just like Red Dog beer, and I'm sticking with that," Srivastava says. But Cutler is more forthcoming: "We were visiting Hotmail," he says, "and there was a really seedy strip joint in San Jose called the Pink Poodle. I said, 'Maybe we ought to name this project the Pink Poodle.' Everybody said, 'Oh, God, we could never do that.' And then somebody said, 'Red Dog,' and we all said, 'What a great name.'" Cutler also had the idea of outfitting team members with shiny red Nike sneakers.

Maybe the most subversive aspect of Microsoft's newest operating system is that it was produced with a fraction of the manpower the company usually directs to critical projects. "There are literally thousands of people on Windows, but small groups with very focused people is a better way of doing things," Cutler says. "So this project is much smaller. It's like 150."

Red Dog, available late next year, will have competition, of course, from Amazon and most certainly Google, whose own cloud OS, App Engine, will offer developers similar hosting benefits at lower cost or even for nothing. But Debra Chrapaty, the Microsoft exec in charge of the company's data centers, says that Microsoft's infrastructure is so efficient it can compete in cost even with a company she refers to by the letter G. (She refuses to speak its name out loud because "every time you say that word, it reinforces their brand," she says.)

Eric Schmidt, CEO of that G-word company, says that because Microsoft has so much market share in servers and operating systems, the Redmondites will certainly be big players in cloud computing. He sees it as an extension of Microsoft's nasty behavior in the '90s. "Microsoft's basic strategy is to gain enough share in cloud computing to force other people to use its standards," he says. (By contrast, Google has blessed an open source version of its cloud technology, which both IBM and Yahoo have adopted.) Ozzie doesn't buy the charge. "Google and Microsoft have the same basic philosophy. We're basing our cloud on Windows technologies because they're great technologies and we have a lot of higher-level services on them. If you want to write open source stuff on them, you can do that."

Srivastava and Cutler predict that Red Dog's reliability will be a competitive edge. "We don't want to say to developers, 'Hey, come and use this platform,' and then have it lose your data," Cutler says. "That would just be bad. I mean, it would be terrible. So we're being really conservative."

Ozzie, of course, loves Red Dog and prizes his red sneakers. But the project closest to his heart may be Live Mesh, one of the building- block services that run on top of the cloud OS. In a sense, it addresses a problem that then-VP Jeff Raikes posed to Ozzie during his first week at Redmond: How can Microsoft connect and synchronize people's contacts, calendars, and other information in a seamless fashion?

For Ozzie, this challenge was profound; it meant using the cloud to connect people to machines and, more important, to each other. "Getting sync right is the essence of everything," he says. "If you don't, everything else fails." And furthermore, it had to be designed in a way to scale to hundreds of millions of concurrent users. "Scalable sync is tough." Apple knows this all too well; when it turned on a similar service called MobileMe last June, it delivered more stink than sync.

Live Mesh looks impressive in demos; it can zip photos and tunes from computers to the cloud. Then it can zing the information off to anything that's connectable, smoothly fitting the stuff into its natural habitat. Whether it will work with millions of people and billions of items—and so simply that those millions of people keep using it—is another matter. (Microsoft's "it just works" record is spotty, to put it gently.) To ensure success, Ozzie has pared down the project to essentials. David Treadwell says the team jettisoned some bells and whistles. "But Ray was very firm," he adds, "about maintaining the soul of the release."

To Ozzie, software's soul does not lie in the accumulation of features. Instead, it lies in his dream of connectivity. "Live Mesh is very Ray," Mitch Kapor says. "It's the son of Groove, which is the son of Notes." Which was, of course, the son of Ozzie's beloved Plato. Thirty-three years later, Ozzie is still trying to build on what he saw in sophomore year. But it's no longer the Ray Ozzie vision. It's Microsoft's.

"Here's the deal," Ozzie says. "Somewhere in my first year, not in the first few months but before the CSA announcement, I had to make an internal decision. If I want to be here, is it to make Microsoft successful or to have a good project, a good experience, whatever? It was an issue of engagement. I asked myself, why do I do what I do? I enjoy solving complex problems that involve technology, people, organizations—the whole mix. So I made the internal decision to do what I can to make Microsoft successful, and that was it. Yes, it took me a while to understand what that meant. No, I haven't worked here for 20 years. But every day I'm up at 5 am and at work at 6 or 6:30. I don't get home until 8. I'm doing everything I can to make this company successful."

That just means getting Microsoft's 90,000 people to follow him into the clouds.

Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) wrote about the creation of Google's new Web browser in issue 16.10.

1816: Gaslight illuminates Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Theatre. Theater patrons are living in an age of wonders: lights that burn "without wick or oil."

Merchant Charles Kugler wanted to construct a gasworks to bring to Philadelphia the modern marvel that was illuminating the streets of London. He set up a demonstration of gaslight at Peale's Museum, which was run by Philadelphia painter Rembrandt Peale.

Typical lighting for the time was by candle or whale-oil lamps. Kugler felt that the cutting-edge technology of producing lighting gas from coal produced such a bad smell that, in Peale's words it "could not, with propriety, be established but at a distance from the city." What's more, coal was often expensive or scarce.

Kugler improved the method by replacing coal with pitch, which was derived from trees and therefore abundant. Pitch was also largely free of the noxious, rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide.

Peale praised Kugler's innovation: "[B]y a simple apparatus, easily managed, without anything offensive in the operation, he prepares a gas at once cheaper and more brilliant, than that prepared from coal."

Kugler's technique used turpentine (also tree-derived) to dissolve the pitch, which was heated in a sealed chamber separate from the firebox beneath it. The resultant gas was passed through a chemical bath to remove tars and odor-causing chemicals. It was then collected under a weighted hood that could be adjusted to keep the clean lighting gas at sufficient pressure to feed the gaslight fixtures in the theater.

Kugler installed the furnace and gas-storage tanks in a room right next to the auditorium of the theater building. Inspired by London's famous Covent Garden Theatre, the Chestnut Street Theatre stood at the northwest corner of Sixth and Chestnut Streets.

The young nation's first purpose-built theatrical venue, it was built between 1792 and 1805 at a cost of $30,000 (about $600,000 in today's money). One of the Chestnut Street's architects was Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who was also working on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

Kugler faced some opposition. Some Philadelphians denounced the gasworks (.pdf) as a danger to public health and safety, maintaining that the plant would emit a stench that was both unpleasant and unhealthy. Further, the gaslight, they said, would use up oxygen and affect the lungs of those in the theater. What's more, an explosion would kill or maim people.

Amidst this display of brotherly love, the theater managers announced they were "happy to be the first to introduce this system of lighting theaters and flatter themselves that its superior safety, brilliancy and neatness will be satisfactorily expressed by the audience." And so it was.

Nonetheless, the Chestnut Street Theatre burned to the ground in 1820. It may have been arson, or ...

Source: Chestnut Street Theatre Project

We tour the history of man-made lights, from oil to arcs to neon. See how far we've come.

Left: Often cited as the most profound and significant human discovery, humans finally were able to manifest light by using fire. Providing civilizations' artificial lighting needs for thousands of years by combusting fuels, fire was replaced only when electricity was discovered.

Gas lighting was first used around the end of the 18th century. Early lamps were fueled by several different gases including methane and ethylene. Through most of the 19th century, gas made from coal was the standard. The lamp in this photo (taken around 1880-1893) may have run on natural gas, which began to replace coal gas at the end of the century.

Kerosene lamps date back to the 9th century, but the first modern kerosene lamp was constructed in 1853 in Poland. These lamps were widely used in rural America in the 1930s. Here, a 1939 migrant worker lights a lamp using a campfire flame.

The arc lamp concept was demonstrated in the early 19th century, but the technology didn't really catch on until the 1880s. Arc lamps consist of two electrodes separated by a gas such as neon, argon or xenon, which is ionized or ignited by an electric charge. The lamp shown here at General Electric's Schenectady Works used mercury.

Limelight, typically used in theaters in the 19th century, is created by directing an oxyhydrogen flame at a cylinder of calcium oxide, or lime. Though limelight has been replaced by modern electric lighting, the phrase "in the limelight" lives on.

Among Thomas Edison's most influential inventions is the incandescent light bulb in 1879. Edison, shown here around 1911, had a total of 1,093 patents in the United States alone. He also held patents in several European countries. By the time he died, he had improved the life of the light bulb from around 40 hours to 1,200 hours using a filament made from bamboo.

During World War I, Americans were asked to cut back on electricity use to conserve coal as demands related to the war escalated. The railroads compounded the problem by working double time as part of the war effort, leaving fewer cars to deliver coal to the country. Many people turned to wood in place of coal to keep warm through the winter.

Neon lights work by applying an electric charge to a sealed tube of neon gas, which causes it to glow. Neon glows reddish orange. Using other gases, such as argon or krypton, or mixing them with neon produces different colors. When neon signs were first introduced in the early 20th century, they were known as "liquid fire." This photo of the Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement was taken in 1943.

Fluorescent lamps are filled with mercury vapor, which produces light when an electric current is passed through it. The mercury atoms are excited, causing them to emit ultraviolet light, which in turn causes a phosphorescent coating on the tube to fluoresce. Both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla experimented with fluorescent lighting in the 1890s. By the middle of the 20th century, fluorescent lights became more common than incandescent lights in the United States.

The word laser is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." A successor to the maser, which amplified microwave radiation rather than visible light, the first working laser was built in 1960 after Bell Labs developed the technology. This laser at the University of Texas at Austin has a peak output of more than a quadrillion watts of power.

Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, seem to be everywhere these days, from flashlights, to signs, to electronic graffiti. But they were not always the life of the party. The first LED was created in the 1920s in Russia when Oleg Vladimirovich Losev noticed that radio diodes emitted light under a current, but his discovery sat for decades without much notice.

In 1962 Nick Holonyak Jr., an employee of General Electric created the first practical LED. The lights quickly became the standard for indicator lights in electronics, and as the technology advanced, they became useful light sources. Losev died of hunger in 1942 during the blockade of Leningrad, unaware of the modern sensation that would stem from his invention 60 years later.

Left: The cartoon image LED placards that were part of a Boston area guerilla marketing campaign for a 2007 film set off a bomb scare.

Energy efficiency is on everyone's mind today. With a recent push from GE, compact fluorescent bulbs have become increasingly popular. Built to last up to 15 times longer than regular incandescent bulbs, they use as little as a fifth of the energy of incandescents. CFLs have some drawbacks: They emit an unpleasant hue and some versions tend to flicker when they start up -- both those problems have been addressed, so the lights perform more like classic bulbs. But the CFLs contain mercury, so they require special disposal and must be kept out of the landfill.