In this video I’m in Austin, Texas, looking at a solution to a problem that sounds obvious in hindsight: if you want to light a city, but you don’t yet have electric cables running down every street… what do you do? Austin’s answer, more than a century ago, was to put the lights on towers: tall, lattice structures that throw light out over a whole neighborhood like artificial moonlight. They’re called the Moonlight Towers, and they’re a surviving piece of infrastructure from the era when “just add more streetlights” wasn’t an option. The key point here isn’t that the towers are brighter or better than modern streetlights — it’s that they’re a snapshot of a transitional technology, built around the limits of the grid at the time. And remarkably, Austin still has them: they’re described as the last urban municipal lighting towers in the world. I talk about what they were for, why they were built the way they were, and why they’ve lasted — not because they’re the most efficient way to light a street in 2026, but because cities don’t just replace everything at once. Sometimes the old solution sticks around, quietly doing its job, because it’s become part of the place.