https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp. These were used for a while before the incandescent bulb for street lighting. The

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp. These were used for a while before the incandescent bulb for street lighting. They aren't very power efficient. I used to work on one in a large projection system and I had to wear protective gear when changing the bulb because it could catastrophically explode. BTW if anyone is interested in the voltage involved here, my friend works for ConEd and was on the scene. It was a 246kv step down transformer to 27kv. They have a lot of redundancy so it was fixed pretty quickly.