The philosopher Arnold Gehlen 1940 wrote that man was a defect being. The myth of progress seems to be based on this: because its organs developed in evolution are too weak, man tries to compensate for this deficiency by means of technology to solve problems. Stupid: Many problems he faces, man has brought himself in. So he puts his technical imagination in motion to invent a thing that can be better than him. And doubt always gnaws on: Is it good enough, or can you do it even better? For example:
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It took a Titanensohns for ancient Greeks to explain blessing of fire. Promeus had brought it to saga in grey preseason of mankind. It also had light in dark when it burned something: wood, oil, gas. Thus it remained until 1802, when British Sir Humphry Davy, using recently discovered electricity, put a stab under current, so that he began to shine. The discovery electrified in true sense of word three generations of inventors who experimented with new light source.
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British James Bowman Lindsay made it 1835 to burn an electric lamp for a few minutes. His compatriot Joseph Wilson Swan had 1850 idea of enclosing filament with a glass flask. While his thread consisted of charred paper, or inventors tried with expensive platinum wires. But no one was able to make a serious replacement for gas lamps of that time. The pears did not burn long enough, especially a reliable power supply was missing.
A star-up of 1870s
All this was changed by ambitious inventor Thomas Edison with his company Edison Electric Light Co. in New Jersey, in a sense start-up of late 1870s. He developed: A method to create a vacuum inside glass piston, a filament of charred bamboo fibres, with which he screwed life of bulb from 14 to 1,200 hours, and screw version that we use to this day. Because no bulb burns without a power supply, he also built first electricity plant in Manhattan 1882, Pearl Street power station. It was actual beginning of electric age.
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Edison’s construction was improved 1904 by making filaments from resistant metal tungsten. The light bulb neverless remained wasteful: a good 90 percent of electrical energy was converted into heat and not into light. Thus an invention of German glass blower Heinrich Geißler from 1857 was taken up again. If you put a gas in a glass piston under tension, it lights up. Unfortunately only bluish-dark.
The Berlin inventor Edmund Germer had n 1926 decisive idea: if glass piston is coated from inside with a phosphorous compound, it absorbs UV light from gas and emits it lumilux again. Thus, much more efficient “tube” was born, and from 1939, it began its triumph as lighting in factories and military facilities in USA and from re worldwide. The 1973 oil crisis, however, first sharpened awareness of electricity wastage. Edward Hammer, an engineer of General Electric, n finished feat three years later to reduce size of a tube to a spiral shape that would fit into a large glass piston with a screw thread. Voilà, “energy-saving lamp” that burns 10,000 hours and gives off four times as much light.
And now? Finally done?
Four times power, ten times service life: that sounds good. But not good enough in times of climate change. While some countries brought compact fluorescent lamp forward by regulation, a true high-tech light was launched in background. If you put specially prepared direct semiconductors like gallium under tension, y also shine – and need very little electricity. This “light-emitting diode”, in short: Led, is one of most beneficial consequences of quantum mechanics. Invented already 1962 by Nick Holonyak, many researchers improved it by end of nineties so that it also made white light.
The 1978 L-Prize of US Department of Energy finally promoted an affordable LED lamp in light bulb form that made it to mass market. Service life: Up to 50,000 hours. Efficiency: 15 times greater than Edison’s pear. According to a quip by design orist Lucius Burckhardt, one could still say: “The light bulb has never been invented.” It is only invented when our energy supply has been rebuilt to 100 percent of renewable energy. Then, for first time since Edison’s days, we could make night a day with a good conscience.
