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The earliest streetlights, introduced in major European cities in the seventeenth century, relied on oil lamps tended nightly by dedicated lamplighters who walked fixed routes at dusk. This arrangement was less about safety in the modern sense and more about municipal control: well-lit streets allowed authorities to monitor movement after dark and reduced the anonymity that darkness afforded to smugglers and dissidents alike. Gas lighting, introduced in the early nineteenth century, extended the hours and reach of illumination dramatically, but it also entrenched the lamplighter's role for decades, since gas lamps still required manual ignition. Only with the spread of electric lighting did automated switching finally displace the profession entirely.