They are also the most efficient lights on the market. Pale yellow and green diodes were invented next. As companies continued to improve red diodes and their manufacturing, they began appeari. Explore the history of fluorescent lights , from the Geissler tube to CFLs. This interactive map is not viewable in your browser. Please view it in a modern browser. Incandescent Bulbs Light the Way Long before Thomas Edison patented -- first in and then a year later in -- and began commercializing his incandescent light bulb, British inventors were demonstrating that electric light was possible with the arc lamp.
What are the key facts? Learn more about the history of the incandescent light bulb. Read about the advancements in LED lights. Served as a digital communications specialist for the Energy Department.
Sometimes Coolidge included additional steps of rolling, drawing, and hammering to make his filament. In this photograph, Coolidge right explains to Thomas Edison left how the swaging machine produces tungsten filaments for incandescent light bulbs.
For example, Battersea clay contains potassium, which incorporated into the tungsten and improved its ductility. But by being watchful and patient with his chemical partner, Coolidge finally got the desired result. In his patent, the filaments were only 2 micrometers in diameter.
GE marketed all of their tungsten filaments under the brand name Mazda, after Ahura Mazda, the Persian god of light and creation. Skip to main content. Login Register. Page 88 DOI: Coolidge developed the tungsten filaments that dominated lighting for a century. Tungsten had enviable properties for a filament: the highest melting point of all elements, a white-hot glow, and the ability to render lifelike colors.
Tungsten is an incredibly difficult metal to work with. After years of trial and error, Coolidge used his deep knowledge and experience to tame tungsten into ductile filaments. Facebook Twitter. Bibliography Briant, C. The Coolidge process for making tungsten ductile: The foundation of incandescent lighting.
MRS Bulletin 20 8 — Coolidge, W. Ductile tungsten. Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers — Morison, E. New York: Basic Books. Miller, J. Yankee Scientist: William David Coolidge. Wolff, M. William D. Coolidge: Shirt-sleeves manager. View manifest View in Mirador. Description Irving Langmuir received a Ph. He studied under Walther Nernst, who had invented a new type of incandescent lamp only a few years before.
Ironically, he soon invented a lamp that made Nernst's lamp and others obsolete. Langmuir experimented with the bendable tungsten wire developed by his colleague William Coolidge.
He wanted to find a way to keep tungsten lamps from "blackening" or growing dim as the inside of the bulb became coated with tungsten evaporated from the filament. Though he did not solve this problem, he did create a coiled-tungsten filament mounted in a gas-filled lamp—a design still used today.
Up to that time all the air and other gasses were removed from lamps so the filaments could operate in a vacuum. Langmuir found that by putting nitrogen into a lamp, he could slow the evaporation of tungsten from the filament. He then found that thin filaments radiated heat faster than thick filaments, but the same thin filament—wound into a coil—radiated heat as if it were a solid rod the diameter of the coil. By Langmuir had gas—filled lamps that gave 12 to 20 lumens per watt lpw , while Coolidge's vacuum lamps gave about 10 lpw.
During the s GE began phasing-in Langmuir's third generation tungsten lamps, calling them "Mazda C" lamps. One of the most important steps prior to Edison was the work of the great British scientist Sir Humphrey Davy. In , he was able to produce the world's first true artificial electric light. Using his recently invented electric battery, Davy connected a set of wires to a piece of carbon to it. Davy was amazed to find that the piece of carbon began to glow and gave off a lot of light.
The world's first arc light had just been created. The only problem was that it didn't last very long and the light given off was too bright for practical use. Over the following 70 years or so, many other inventors created their own versions of light bulbs. Whilst they all showed promise, most, if not all, proved too expensive to produce or had other issues that prevented them from becoming commercially viable.
One of the most notable versions was created by another British Scientist Warren de la Rue in He enclosed a coil of platinum filament inside a vacuum tube and ran some current through it. As platinum was such an expensive metal, this seriously limited the commercial viability of his design. In , another British inventor, Joseph Wilson Swan , put his considerable talents to the challenge.
To countenance the problems de la Rue experienced, Swan decided to experiment with less expensive filament materials. He finally settled on using carbonized paper to replace platinum which showed some promise.
By he had a working prototype, but the lack of a good vacuum and an adequate supply of electricity resulted in a bulb whose longevity was much too short to be considered an effective producer of light. It also tended to blacken, or soot, the inside of the vacuum tube which was less than ideal as you can see in the image above.
Despite these setbacks, Swan continued to work on his design. As vacuum tube technology improved in the s, Swan was able to make some further significant breakthroughs. The culmination of all his work was his development of a long-lasting light bulb.
0コメント