Talk:Incandescent light bulb

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Timeline Edit Request

Hmm... Where is Ladygin with his volfram lamp, argon lamp, and patents which was selled to General Electrics on this timeline?.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.179.109.163 (talk) 15:57, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

The timeline shows that Lewis Latimer was responsible for "Better Filament Production". However, his contribution to the production techniques of carbon filaments during that time were among hundreds of advancements in carbon filament manufacture. He is mentioned in this articles purely for bias and POV, as Mr. Latimer is cited by many black-supremacy groups as not only being influential to the development of incandescent bulbs, but in some cases cited as having been the actual inventor of the bulb itself.

If his name is not removed from the timeline by 11/10/2011, I will add to the timeline the name of every inventor who holds patents for the manufacture of carbon filaments for the incandescent bulb, since it's so obviously important that we mention Latimer's near-insignificant process. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.119.76.228 (talk) 11:58, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Okay, it's the 11th. I forgot. But later today, I'm going to be doing exactly that - adding at least a dozen inventors names to the timeline for "filament production techniques." Seriously, does no-one have any thoughts on this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.119.76.228 (talk) 06:22, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

The timline is not compatible with the information in the article, For example it says William David Coolage invented Tungston fillement 1910. But in the article it says "On December 13, 1904, Hungarian Sándor Just and Croatian Franjo Hanaman were granted a Hungarian patent (No. 34541)..." Which is not mentioned in the timeline. This is only one example. --upulpp 04:42, 14 December 2011 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Upulpp(talk • contribs)

Feel free to edit the article text or the timeline to be consistent. The timeline can be edited at Template:Early evolution of the light bulb .  Stepho  talk  09:44, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

The history of technology is full of "rival claimants" who worked on something before the inventor who actually invented a practical or commercially useful device. Addition to a timeline of dozens of tinkerers who were unsuccessful would be disruptive editing, and is not recommended. We look for reliable secondary sources, such as books on the history of technology from respected university presses, rather than original research by people who found a patent somewhere and infer success it does not imply. In the case of Just and Hanaman, the reference cited is from a Hungarian branch of GE, and does not rank high as an "independent and reliable source." But taking it at face value, note that it credits Thomas Edison with the first bulb useful for illuminating purposes, in 1879. Then it says Just and Hanaman made their tungsten bulb by plating a similar carbon filament with tungsten, then the carbon was removing by heating the filament. The document says the patent wasn't issued until December, 1904, not that the bulbs were offered for sale in 1904. It says the Tungsram trademark was not registered until 1909, and the Russian Tungsram poster dates from 1910, not 1904. It does not say the lamps were filled with inert gas. It does not say when Just/Hanaman tungsten lamps were first manufactured and sold, but it may have been a couple of years later. A snippet view of a journal article [1] says that the Just/Hanaman lamps were first produced in 1906. The Just-Hanaman lamps were "too fragile for general use." The resulting filament was brittle. In 1905 the factory was "unable to produce lamps free from faults". The company using the Just-Hanaman process "in practice had failed to produce a lamp of satisfactory quality.." and they fired Just and switched to a different process in 1909. A book says the Just-Hanaman lamps were "inferior in terms of quality." This is a poor way to make filaments. It was replaced by Coolidge's superior invention of starting with powdered tungsten and making it ductile, and drawing a tungsten filament, and making it into the tight spiral familiar a century later. I found a timeline in [2]"The fundamentals of nuclear power," M.W. Hubbell," Authorhouse, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4634-2441-1, page 31, which credits Just and Hanaman, 1904""..granted a Hungarian patent for a tungsten filament lamp, improving the light bulb." If we search for Coolidge and "tungsten filament," there are scads of reliable sources giving him credit. See Palombi, page 153-156]which discusses the contributions of Just& Hanaman(1904 patent for tungsten filament), as well as Coolidge ductile tungsten filament, 1910 and Langmuir (nitrogen added to bulb with tungsten filament, and coiling the filament, 1913. We must beware of giving undue weight, or of implying in a timeline that Just and Hananam did more than they accomplished. The "drawn wire tungsten filament" was a truly big deal and came from Coolidge's success in 1910 and Langmuir's in 1913. So far the only addition I recommend to the timeline is for the "First patent for a tungsten filament lamp, Just and Hanaman, 1904." Edison (talk) 15:27, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

I added Hanaman and Just to the timeline, along with Coolidge.Edison (talk) 17:33, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Please note that I said the article text and timeline should be made consistent but that I did not specify the exact details of which should be altered. If the timeline is the more accurate representation of major events then the article text should be made also make the points you mentioned above - ie specifying which events are major events and which are just intermediate steps. I'm not an expert in the field, so I'm reluctant to do the editing myself but I'm happy with pointing out WP tips (people seemed to have trouble figuring out how to edit that timeline). Cheers.  Stepho  talk  23:02, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Timeline awkwardly placed

The timeline itself contains little information, yet it takes up a huge amount of article space. I do not understand the timeline layout and formatting - would it be possible to float it to the right side of the page so that there could be text alongside it? Where can I find a guide about this kind of information presentation? Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:03, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Error/unclarity in definition of luminous efficacy

Article says this: "Luminous efficacy of a light source is a ratio of the visible light energy emitted (the luminous flux) to the total power input to the lamp." Flux is a measure of power, not energy. It might be better stated "Luminous efficacy is the ratio of the power of the light emitted (the luminous flux) to the total power input to the lamp." JohnEinNJ (talk) 19:21, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

The chart would help if it included more than incandescents and halogens; why doesn't it contain common fluorescent, compact fluorescent, and LEDs that people may have experience with? I have an LED bulb in my hand that does 54 lm/watt right now. 76.21.107.221 (talk) 22:32, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 14 April 2012

please change "easy bake oven toy to household appliances.

99.56.240.174 (talk) 16:11, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

 Not done: If you can find a reference which calls it a household appliance, reopen the request. Thanks, Celestra (talk) 19:03, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

"triac" should link to TRIAC

The phrase "phase-control triac dimmers" links "triac" to Wikipedia's article on thyristors. Since there's a dedicated article for TRIAC, the link should be changed.

Done. Also linked dimmer. Thanks. Ccrrccrr (talk) 21:35, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Who invented the lightbulb?

That's the big question that makes this a Wikipedia Vital Article, but I believe we're unnecessarily adding confusion here in our article where it doesn't need to be. For instance the way Davy is highlighted with the timeline and the opening paragraphs give him massive undue importance. First, he did not invent or ever make a light bulb, which is the subject of our article. If we want to talk about another subject, the arc light; or we want to discuss the science that preceded the light bulb, then we need to be more clear that Davy was not one of the light bulb inventors. Even then, L. Davis, the author used as a source for Davy, speaking of the arc light (not even a light bulb) actually says that Davy "didn't invent it and never claimed to" (it was Allasandro Volta, 1800). So does Davy even warrant a mention here? At the very least we need to restructure to remove the confusion placing him at the top of light bulb inventors. Our article also needs to be clear that James Bowman Lindsay did in fact invent the first light bulb in 1835, not just an "electric light" as it says, which confuses him with the earlier inventors of non-bulb lights. The facts that 1) he didn't patent or promote it, 2) it was not commercially viable, and 3) it was a very, very short-lived filament... all do not diminish that he invented, built, and described a light bulb in 1835, which is the subject of our article. --Tom Hulse (talk) 08:05, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article about Lindsay cites a local newspaper from 1835 as the only support for a claim that he demonstrated any incandescent light, and unfortunately it is impossible to verify what the local paper said. Do you have access to it? Many experimenters applied a battery to a piece of iron or platinum wire and made it glow, to the amazement of their neighbors. It is a far reach to then claim that he "invented a light bulb" or even that his filament was contained in a bulb, whether evacuated or not. You might wish to improve the Lindsay article by adding reliable sources. Edison (talk) 13:37, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Here is Lindsay's 1835 account of his demonstration of electric light. He apparently repeated the demonstrations of Davy and others that electric current would make a filament glow, and he said it glowed in air or in a glass tube without air. There is no independent verification, and no indication that it lasted longer than the typical few hours before the filament burned out. It sounds pretty dim, since he only claims he could read print 18 inches from it. Edison (talk) 13:49, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes I agree that the James Bowman Lindsay article also needs to be updated, but because it is a much-less watched page, I wanted these very important changes to be vetted by a wider group first. Didn't want to sneak anything in the back door. ;) I will make sure to add sources that verify his device was used for lighting (reading/writing) and that he did enclose it in glass and discuss it burning without air. When you say that "Many experimenters applied a battery to a piece of iron...", as if it were nothing, we only care here about the first to do that and enclose it in glass for the purpose of lighting. Reliable sources say the Lindsay did that in 1835. No reliable source says that anyone else did it earlier. The independant verification that he invented it is 1) his word printed by public news before anyone else invented or even described it (timing is the main proof, his word is second), and 2) independant published account that the lectures did actually take place where he showed the invention, including dates, times, & location. 3)Many secondary sources establishing he had a light bulb in 1835. The fact that it burned dimly (or any other quality issue) is irrelevant to the question of who first invented the light bulb, except in this case to prove that Lindsay's was not an arc light. Many of the secondary sources give credit to Warren De la Rue in 1820 for inventing the light bulb, following a huge error in Ency Britt. Even our Warren De la Rue page said he did, I just fixed it; you might want to review my edit there. They failed to notice that he would have been only 5 yrs old at the time, lol! I'll try to get these changes done within the week. --Tom Hulse (talk) 20:18, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

The archive of this talk page has a considerable amount of references regarding early experimenters who made wires glow with electricity. Priestley wrote about it in the 1770's, back when a series of Leyden jars charged from a static machine was the strongest current source. Many experimenters after 1800 built Voltaic batteries and used them to heat wires to incandescence. "De la Rue" and De la Rive" both have been credited with making wires glow in glass cylinders. It is hard to pin down what publication or experiment the various later writers on the history of incandescent lighting were thinking of when they attribute early experiments to one of the two names. Lindsay's1835 letter to the newspaper is not really a reliable source. Reports by other reliable observers are needed. Making a wire glow dimly for a short while in 1835 is not a breakthrough or innovation. Edison (talk) 18:40, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

In the archives of this talkpage, please see Talk:Incandescent light bulb/Archive 2#Humphry Davy + incandescent light where I cited "The Engineering Magazine," McGraw-Hill publishing company, inc.,New York, Volume VII, April to September 1894, "Development of the incandescent electric light, by John W. Howell, pages 70-77 " which says (p71) that Davy in 1808 experimented with his large battery and "Metallic wires and pieces of carbon were heated to incandescence in the open air, and in globes which were exhausted, or filled with different gases at different pressures." In "American electrical directory" (1886) p94 and following, Dr Otto Moses in a meeting of the National Electric Light Association says that Davy "was really the discoverer of the incandescent light, and that early experiments of Star, Swan and others "were not much in advance of what Sir Humphrey Davy had done fifty years before." The book says Thomas Edison and assistants then took up incandescent lighting and "in a couple of years brought it to a state of great development and perfection," while Swan resumed his abandoned work of the 1860's. Was Moses a credible source? The journal Electrical Review in 1910 wrote favorably about that particular talk. From this and other works discussing the history of the development of incandescent lights in the 19th century, it appears that Lindsay (1835) merely replicated Davy (1808) and should not be credited with "inventing the incandescent light bulb" or much of anything else. Edison (talk) 19:08, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

[3] says of Thomas de la Rue, father of Warren de la Rue, that "In 1829 he had made the first known attempt to produce an incandescent light bulb. Although an effective design, his use of platinum for the filament made it commercially unviable." Countless other books on the history of the incandescent light disagree with that statement about the "effectiveness" of a platinum filament, since there is too little margin between the temperature of effective incandescence and the melting point, which is why no commercially useful bulb was ever made with platinum. Swan and Edison went to carbon, which was later supplanted by tungsten. Edison (talk) 03:14, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Bulb heat emission

I've noticed that source [36] is not related to any document. There's just written the page and the table number, without any other reference. Actually, the sentence it refers to attracts my curiosity as well: isn't all the power converted into heat for a light source? I mean, visible light is a form of radiation transferring heat.. Stefanomoret (talk) 23:44, 10 May 2012 (UTC)Stefano

Fixed, looking at the text from a couple of years ago this was a reference to GE TP110 technical bulletin. --Wtshymanski (talk) 01:40, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for that, is there public access to that source? Anyway, I still think the sentence it refers to is misleading. Stating that a certain percentage of input power is "lost as heat" and the rest goes into visible radiation is not really correct, because all electromagnetic radiation goes ultimately into heat. The fact of part of heat being visible is already taken into account for by "luminous efficacy". Stefanomoret (talk) 17:21, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it's hard to describe accurately in a simple way. Of course the light eventually becomes heat, unless it happens to go out the window, into the sky and travel forever without hitting a planet. But the point is that it illuminates objects in a useful way first, whereas the IR radiation does not. But it's still kind of arbitrary. You could say x% is emitted as visible radiation, y% is emitted as IR radiation, and z% is heat loss by convection. And some heat conducted out the base. But it's hard to you the breakdown of the different heat loss mechanisms. So it's tempting to lump together heat IR radiation, convection and conduction as the part that is "lost to heat" and consider the visible radiation all as being useful. But to do that you need a cutoff for what is visible and what is not, and there's a wide range of wavelengths in the deep red that are almost invisible and pretty might might as well be IR. So there's no one correct number that is the percentage. Ccrrccrr (talk) 01:48, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Ok, but then if you write that "90%" is lost as heat, which of the x, y, z component are you considering? To take into account these different components there are actually different parameters which are measured: luminous efficacy of a source (luminous flux / power input) and luminous efficacy of radiation (luminous flux / total radiation). Stefanomoret (talk) 23:01, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Efficiency and environmental impact

I've made the following changes to the first section of "efficiency and environmental impact"

• Clarify the difference between radiant luminous efficacy (LER) and source luminous efficacy (LES)
• Specify the values in the table that are LER and LES
• Removed the LER of "white light" as 240 lpw, since the white light source was not defined, and it REALLY must be.
• Removed the reference for the two idealized sources at 4000 and 7000 K, since it was not relevant to the values given. I believe the value for the 4000 K source is incorrect, it should be 8% and 55 lpw, but I have not changed the values.
• Corrected misuse of "efficiency"
• Replaced 3683 as the melting point of tungsten with 3695, as per theTungsten article.

PAR (talk) 04:44, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Redirect here from "light bulb"

Right now this Light bulb redirects to Incandescent light bulb. I am not sure that this should be the case. In contemporary times worldwide many communities are discouraging some traditional household uses of incandescent light bulbs and encouraging the public to use other kinds of bulbs. I am not sure that the term "light bulb" for most people still refers to an incandescent bulb - I have lived in the United States and India and in both countries many local broad government efforts have for years encouraged people to use fluorescent bulbs, for example.
Could I request comment on creating an article called "Light bulb" which would give general information on Compact fluorescent lamps and Incandescent light bulbs? This new article would draw from both of those and take information from Electric light. The use that I am imagining is that a household could want information about various types of lightbulbs for home use, and the problem which I want to circumvent is the the search of someone seeking a household-use overview for "light bulb", and instead that person gets a history of the originally invented lightbulb rather than information about all contemporary light bulbs.
What is the rationale for having "light bulb" redirect here instead of to its own article or to electric light? Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:27, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

For the rationale, the term "bulb" refers to the shape of the glass containment, whereas fluorescents are commonly referred to as "tubes." That said, it is fairly common for people to simply refer to all lights as bulbs. I really don't have much of an opinion on the redirect myself, but just thought I'd answer your last question. Perhaps others will come along and help sort this out. Zaereth (talk) 20:42, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Edit request

The page on incandescent lightbulbs needs this information added:

"The white powdery substance on the inside of most common household and commercial incandescent bulbs is called Kaolin. Kaolin, or Kaolinite, is a white, chalky clay in a very fine powder form, that is blown in and electrostaticlly deposited on the interior of the bulb. It serves to very effectively diffuse the light emitted from the filament, producing a more gentle and evenly distributed light. Manufacturers are able to vary the thickness, composition and total amount of the kaolin in a bulb in order to adjust the characteristics of the final light emitted from the bulb. Many brands are established around this, notably General Electric's "Reveal" series. Kaolin diffused bulbs are used extensively in interior lighting because of their comparatively gentle light."

The page is semi-protected, and while I am an expert on the subject, I am not a registered user. Just thought I'd make my little contribution here and there. If someone could please add.

Definitive citations (permalink):

http://www.geconsumerandindustrial.com/environmentalinfo/documents/msds/msds_incandescent_lamps.pdf

potential citations:

<http://www.teamdroid.com/diy-hollow-out-a-light-bulb/> & <http://www.geconsumerandindustrial.com/environmentalinfo> — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.9.44.78 (talk • contribs) 22:08, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Posted by an anon on WT:ENERGY, posted here on behalf of anon by User:extra999. extra999 (talk) 08:59, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

I have added this information, per your request, to the construction section. I made a few minor changes to avoid a promotional tone, and changed the part about thickness of the coating, composition, etc..., to simply "pigments" because that's all the source says. (Only 1 source seems to be very helpful; but it is a primary source, so a secondary source would be helpful, if you can provide one. Zaereth (talk) 00:54, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

 Already done}. Mdann52 (talk) 06:01, 13 August 2012 (UTC)