“If someone could look at the earth from outer space, see how it rotated every twenty-four hours into the shadow of night, they would see millions, hundreds of millions, of incandescent bulbs light up nightly, glowing with white-hot tungsten, in the folds of that shadow—and know that man had finally conquered the darkness.”

—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.