Collaborate Disseminate
These days, we have LED light bulbs that will last a decade. But it wasn’t so long ago that incandescent lamps were all we had, and they burned out after several months. Thomas Edison’s early light bulbs used bamboo filaments that burned out very quickly. An inventor and draftsman named …read more
Continue reading Lewis Latimer Drafted the Future of Electric Light
With the holidays over, many of us are braving the elements to take down all those holiday lights. LED lights have largely taken over the market, but in some places, you can still get classic incandescent bulbs. There are some effects that LEDs can’t quite mimic yet. One of those is the magic of “twinkling” light sets, which [Alec Watson] explains in a Technology Connections video. Everyone has seen bulbs that flash, and strings that dim. But the twinkle effect until recently has been hard to describe.
Typical flashing bulbs use a bimetallic strip. As the filament of the bulb …read more
With the holidays over, many of us are braving the elements to take down all those holiday lights. LED lights have largely taken over the market, but in some places, you can still get classic incandescent bulbs. There are some effects that LEDs can’t quite mimic yet. One of those is the magic of “twinkling” light sets, which [Alec Watson] explains in a Technology Connections video. Everyone has seen bulbs that flash, and strings that dim. But the twinkle effect until recently has been hard to describe.
Typical flashing bulbs use a bimetallic strip. As the filament of the bulb …read more
In the real world, components don’t work like we imagine they do. Wires have resistance, resistors have inductance, and capacitors have resistance. However, some designers like to take advantage of those imperfections, something our old friend [Ken Shirriff] noted when he was restoring the CRT of a Xerox Alto.
[Ken] tried to connect a Xerox monitor to the Alto and — since it was almost as old as the Alto — he wasn’t surprised that it didn’t work. What did surprise him, though, is that when he turned the monitor off, a perfect picture appeared for just a split second …read more
Continue reading Xerox Alto CRTs Needed a Tiny Lightbulb to Function
Many credit the invention of the incandescent light bulb with Edison or Swan but its development actually took place over two centuries and by the time Edison and Swan got involved, the tech was down to the details. Those details, however, meant the difference between a laboratory curiosity that lasted minutes before burning out, and something that could be sold to consumers and last for months. Here then is the story of how the incandescent light bulb was invented.
Our story starts in 1761 with Ebenezer Kinnersley. In a letter to Benjamin Franklin he described experiments he …read more
Continue reading How Many Inventors Does It Take To Invent A Light Bulb
We’re all used to making our own lighting projects. Triac dimmers, LEDs, Neopixels, EL wire, there is a huge array of lighting components and technologies at our fingertips. But how many of us have made our own lighting rather than buying off-the-shelf? [Confined Maker] set out to do just that by creating an incandescent light bulb from scratch, and since he’s obviously a hacker with a bit of class he did it in an empty Dom Perignon champagne bottle.
It might seem a daunting project, but as he shows us in the video below the break, it turns out to …read more
If you read our recent feature about the Tal-y-Llyn Railway, the world’s first preserved line, you may have taken a while to watch the short film about the railway in the early 1950s. It was the work of an American film maker, [Carson “Kit” Davidson].
His other work includes some films that might be of interest to Hackaday readers, including one filmed in 1977: “100 Watts 120 Volts”. In it, he follows the manufacture of Duro-Test 100-watt light bulbs through all the stages of their assembly as neck, filament and envelope are brought together in strangely beautiful twentieth century production …read more
