The Birth of the Grid
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
All the more remarkable when you consider how inefficient the "electric lightbulb" is - it's heating a metal filament to a ludicrous temperature (towards 3000K because that's the colour you want) to get light instead of just directly converting the electrical energy into light as you would now.
In contrast, gas or candles warm the outside air directly, release hot waste gasses, etc. Lot's of energy that gets lost.
Trying to set something on fire with a classical light bulb is tricky. With a candle, instant effect.
Although it's possible to do this, I don't think commercial incandescent bulbs do, by the 1930s it was well understood that various noble gases work better and are affordable once you decide you're going to produce them in suitable quantities to make light bulbs. I'd be surprised if somehow those still produced don't use noble gases.
At the point when inventors are first trying to make electric light they don't know these gases exist but by the era of the mass produced light bulb scientists know the answer to "What's invisible and doesn't react with hot metal?" is actually "Any of the gases on this part of my periodic table of elements†" not just "A vacuum".
† In the late 19th or early 20th century this table would look all wrong to you, but it's clearly the same idea, and unless you remember your chemistry well or know from first principles why such a table must have a particular shape you can't fix their table, you just know it looks wrong.
For a while there, Stepney had street lighting in series which faded as the resistance rose down the path. There must have been a time with Gaslight, DC, and emerging AC all at the same time in the cityscape.
Australias electricity reticulation in Victoria is a fine story too. Gen. Monash who was one of the "victors of WW1" along with the NZ and Canadian equivalents was in charge post-war. He also got caught up in a ridiculous right-wing coup (he refused the offer of being the titular dictator)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guard the more neutral PoV
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/29900970 National library of Australia contemporary newspaper report
https://bpb-ca-c1.wpmucdn.com/sites.uoguelph.ca/dist/1/170/f... discusses the electrification of london from the 1880s. There was mixed AC and DC supply for some time. Ferranti led efforts to switch to AC and deploy a huge (for the time) AC system. The article says both that DC supply persisted into the 1950s and was uneconomic for transmission beyond about 1.5miles. Maybe that's the root of "lights getting dimmer"