In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, gas lanterns were the basic method of lighting urban areas. Not many of them have been preserved in Poland today, but in those days every modern city could boast a more or less dense network of street lamps. What this looked like in practice can be seen on this 1940 plan of Świdnica, which shows the layout of the town's gas lighting.

In the bottom right corner there is a legend describing the type of lighting used on the town's streets. A distinction was made between evening and night lamps, as well as between those with more than ten burners, which were located by the main bridges, in the market square and in what is now Plac Wolności square and Sikorskiego street, i.e. in places with large concentrations of residents and tourists.

The plan shows that Świdnica was illuminated by almost a thousand street lamps in those days. It is easy to imagine how much work the town's lamplighters had to do lighting and extinguishing them.