A rather punishing snow storm affected much of coastal southeast Massachusetts on December 26, 1909. Many of the town's street lighting and lighting service lines were downed. But thanks to quick and efficient linemen, service to all customers and the town's three series street lighting circuits was restored in less than a week.

Shown is a close look at one of the town's last street lights using earlier-type carbon-filament street light bulbs. These were known as Bernstein lamps (introduced in the 1890s) and their successors were tungsten bulbs that were much more energy efficient and lasted longer. Further, the newly introduced street light bulbs had a screw socket base and were not exposed to the harsh elements like the one in the above photo. There were lots of circuit problems (continuity; electrically very similar as a string of series Christmas tree lights) with the old Bernstein lamps, mostly owing to the weather and aging of their wiring, sockets, etc. In 1903 a program started whereby old fixtures like the one seen were retrofitted with new sockets to accomodate the then-new tungsten, mogul-socket series street lighting lamps and this project was completed by around 1909-1910 in Hingham. This also provided improved street lighting circuit reliability as well as improved safety (especially upon relamping on live circuits), since open-circuits within series street lighting loops inherently have very high and deadly voltages.