It glowed a greenish color due to his phosphors, but had a short life. The hostile conditions in the arc tube corroded the electrodes and destroyed the lamp. If more attention had been paid to his work and more funds invested, he might have finished developing the lamp.
The ugly green color did not help him persuade investors. Berlin, Germany. Hull had contributed much in the field of vacuum tubes, he was able to build of the work of Moore whose patents were bought by General Electric.
Hull was able to develop a stronger UV emission from the tube. Most importantly he developed a way to make electrodes that would not disintegrate. He set the stage for the final advancements 6 years later. Photo: Edison Tech Center. Roberts develop the first true fluorescent lamp. Their lamp has real white phosphors, is stable, reliable, and their design has not changed much in 78 years.
Photo: The Schenectady Museum. See the timeline below for more details. Found and Willard Roberts w C. Nickel and G. Fonda Schenectady all work on better phosphors for more light output with better white colors. They discover the use of zinc-beryllium silicate and magnesium tungstate.
He did not patent the lamp early on and GE though it would be too expensive to manufacture. Later on the spiral tube design spread and became the lamp we know today.
Hammer works under original light creator Richard Thayer. In addition to this Ed Hammer also developed more efficient straight tube lamps starting with the F Watt Miser. Anderson developed many improvements in the fluorescent lamp: short arc fluorescent lamp, fluorescent lamp without ballast, improved electrodes and fluorescent lamp dimming technology. Anderson was a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and employee of General Electric with 27 patents - related to lamp technology.
Read more on Anderson's work. Photo: John Anderson. Myths about the fluorescent lamp and inventors:. The internet has permitted growth of myths about many technologies due to web authors using unsupported facts from dubious websites. As you can see from the list above Nikola Tesla and Agapito Flores did not invent the fluorescent lamp. Many poorly researched internet sources will claim they did. Most of these sources are "content farms" which pump out online articles with less than one hours work on the part of the author.
This means no proper research was done. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and therefore is also prone to inaccuracies created by fanatics of Tesla and Flores. Development Timeline:. Early History: the invention was developed one part at time over many years. Bonn, Germany s - Use of fluorescent coating, high frequencies: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla separately pursued the idea of fluorescent lamps.
Edison lamps used a calcium tungstate as a fluorescent coating. Tesla used a high frequency model that made a greenish light. All of these attempts failed to be commercially successful due to short lamp life, poor reliability, and poor light color. The tubes were meters long and were installed in offices and shops. Unlike the modern fluorescent lamp his device used an electric arc in CO2 or Nitrogen to make a white an pink light. It was much more efficient than the incandescent lamp.
The problem was that the system was very expensive to install and used very high voltages a danger to humans working on them. East Orange, New Jersey. While some had experimented with using mercury vapor in Germany and England, Hewitt's design was able to produce a bright high quality light with a wide enough spectrum of emitted light to be usable. This lamp produced UV rays which would turn out to be useful later on. A ballast was located above the lamp to create a reliable, controlled power source.
Coolidge develops ductile tungsten for use in incandescent bulbs at General Electric in Schenectady. This miracle material finds use in many other lamps such as halogen, sodium, mercury vapor, fluorescent, and more. It is a wire which is wrapped into a filament or electrode. Georges Claude developed this cold cathode lamp which lead the way to the fluorescent lamp.
Paris, France - First fluorescent lamp to use UV: Edmund Germer built a low voltage fluorescent lamp similar to the modern fluorescent.
It used UV rays to excite phosphors. The color of the lamp was an unpleasant greenish color and the product was never fully developed. His lamp is considered the first fluorescent lamp, however a lot of work still needed to be done to make the lamp have a decent lifespan. Berlin, Germany - Electrode design in the fluorescent lamp: Albert W. Hull develops a tungsten electrode which would not disintegrate and created a stronger UV light.
Some of this work had been based on the work of Leroy J. Buttolph at GE in Albert Hull was also the developer of many electron tubes, improved xray, and numerous other developments. General Electric bought Germer's patents in order to continue work on the lamp. Schenectady, NY - The first modern fluorescent lamp! Arthur H. Compton inventor of the sodium vapor lamp at Westinghouse, visits Oxford, England.
He meets with local lamp inventors who are working with a 2 ft long tube with yellow-green colored phosphors. He writes to William L. Enfield at General Electric. William Enfield leads a group to develop a fluorescent lamp which would be a white color, and have reliability sufficient for commercial sale.
Nela Park, Ohio. Roberts develop the first modern fluorescent lamp. Fonda Schenectady develop better phosphors zinc-beryllium silicate white and magnesium tungstate daylight white. Nela Park, Schenectady. By Westinghouse was selling the lamps as well with an improved starter.
Hammer's CFL worked at curbing reflective losses by spacing his spiral design in a certain way. The lamp is not patented early and GE thought that the 28 million dollar cost to build a production facility was too much. The prototype sat in Hammer's office and it is theorized that visitors from competing companies copied the design.
The first prototype was donated to the Smithsonian institute. Harnden at General Electric. It uses a F20 T12 tube and the ballast as a resistance, it does not use a transformer. For a comprehensive early history on the invention and development of the fluorescent lamp see the link below:. An original daylight fluorescent tube at the Edison Tech Center, visit us.
Lamps are presented in the order of chronological development. Previous: Sodium Lamps Next: Halogen Lamps The Electric Light Main Page. Help us edit and add to this page by becoming a ETC volunteer! Give us feedback on this and other pages using our Facebook Page. Back to Home. Article by M.
Sources: John D. Harnden Jr. John Miller. Educational Use: Students and teachers may use photos and videos for school. Graphics and photos must retain the Edison Tech Center watermark or captions and remain unmanipulated except for sizing. Payment is needed for this service.
See our donate page for pricing, and our catalogue for a listing of videos on DVD. The inside of a fluorescent tube contains various chemical components and two electrodes at either end which are wired to an electrical circuit. These chemical components are:. The electrical circuit connects to an AC supply through contact pins at the end of the tube which connect to a light fitting.
Inside the glass tube is a small amount of mercury and an inert gas like argon. If you've broken a fluorescent tube or come into contact with the inside of the tube you might have noticed a powder-like substance, this is the phosphor powder which coats the inside of the glass. The basic process of lighting a fluorescent tube involves an electrical current provoking chemical reactions which result in a light being emitted. This is what happens when you turn on the light:. Our in-depth guide answers your questions about fluorescent tubes and lamps so you can shop with us in confidence.
The cost to run fluorescent tubes depends on several factors: the wattage of the tube, the cost of electricity and whether you are using high frequency or switch start control gear. Lamps run much more efficiently when using high frequency ballasts but much more inefficiently when using switch start.
If you change your 2ft T12 tube to a 2ft 18w tube, you go from a 20w tube to an 18w tube, thus costing less in electricity. If you changed your 2ft t8 fitting to a 2ft t5 fitting, you go from 18w down to 14w. According to Mercury Recycling , the mercury from found in just one fluorescent tube can pollute 30, litres of water enough to make it unsafe for human consumption.
This means that safe disposal of tubes is vital to minimise negative environmental impact and the risk of poisoning. Fluorescent tubes are classified as hazardous waste and despite only posing a small risk to human health, they can cause environmental damage.
Mercury Recycling recommends recycling, as opposed to disposing of, your fluorescent tubes as the safest and cheapest option. For more information, read our guide to fluorescent tube disposal. Yes, and using them can be of great benefit to your fish. Read our guide for further information.
Yes, please read our in-depth guide on how to grow plants indoors using fluorescent lamps. You will need a starter if you are running your tubes using switch start control gear. The electrical circuit, which we'll examine later, is hooked up to an alternating current AC supply.
When you turn the lamp on, the current flows through the electrical circuit to the electrodes. There is a considerable voltage across the electrodes, so electrons will migrate through the gas from one end of the tube to the other.
This energy changes some of the mercury in the tube from a liquid to a gas. As electrons and charged atoms move through the tube, some of them will collide with the gaseous mercury atoms. These collisions excite the atoms, bumping electrons up to higher energy levels. When the electrons return to their original energy level, they release light photons. As we saw in the last section, the wavelength of a photon is determined by the particular electron arrangement in the atom.
The electrons in mercury atoms are arranged in such a way that they mostly release light photons in the ultraviolet wavelength range. Our eyes don't register ultraviolet photons, so this sort of light needs to be converted into visible light to illuminate the lamp. This is where the tube's phosphor powder coating comes in. Phosphors are substances that give off light when they are exposed to light.
When a photon hits a phosphor atom, one of the phosphor's electrons jumps to a higher energy level and the atom heats up.
When the electron falls back to its normal level, it releases energy in the form of another photon.
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