In days past, no doubt, there were people who bemoaned the switch from gas lighting to electric lighting, for some of the same reasons as Ron Rosenbaum produces here. Or, for that matter, people who complained about switching from candles to gas lighting. Give me a break.

I'm not a Luddite, he pleads, just a romantic. That's the trouble. He confuses "incandescent" with "warm light" the same way the some people conflate "all-natural" with "healthy." Incandescent light can produce harsh light too, and there are warm spectrum CFLs that produce light better than a soft white bulb.

The initial users of incandescent bulbs would be astounded by Rosenbaum's paean to them -- they would have considered them harsh, overly bright and, and altogether unnatural, especially next to the soft light from town gas and other conveniences of the day.

I can see someone in the 1880s writing,

Yes, electric bulbs. Buzzing, flickering, able to cause epileptic seizures in the susceptible, in addition to headaches and other neurological symptoms. Let's smash all the gas lights and replace their glowing beauty with the harsh anatomizing light of electric lamps.

We can be certain that self-proclaimed romantics will be complaining in a few years when LEDs begin to replace CFLs.

Perhaps you're confusing "color rendering index" and "color temperature". Your brain automatically compensates for the color of light. But it can't compensate for colors that are missing. The fluorescents I've seen, even those that purport to provide "full spectrum" lighting, even horrifically expensive tropical-fish-life-support lights, produce inferior light to an incandenscent, regardless of color temperature.

In the early decades of the twentieth century many electrical systems used 25 Hz alternating current. With these systems tungsten filaments did flicker. That's probably why 60 Hz AC became universally adopted.