Incandescent lamps

The tungsten glower is not the only, and not the last, development of a physicist from America named William Coolidge. An inexpensive X-ray tube based on a tungsten cathode also belongs to his inventions.

Everyone knows how difficult it is to suffer a toothache, it’s unpleasant, and it would seem, how you can find a positive grain in this pain, but here William managed to find a positive side, and it is not known how electricity and lighting would develop if at some moment the physicist did not feel that the tooth was aching up to impossibility, and it would be exactly necessary to go to the dentist.

Lamps, both incandescent, and EVL are familiar to many modern people. The basis in the incandescent lamp, for example, is a thread of tungsten, which is heated by electric current, red-hot, shining, giving a soft, warm light to the surrounding space. But such a lamp did not appear immediately. So the lamp invented by Edison (1878) was not completed, because the incandescent glower made of paper burned out very often by charring. In 1882, Lewis Latimer patented a lamp, where charcoal filaments served as a glower, of course, such lamps served a little longer, but still they were far from the perfect instrument.

Improving the properties of the glower

The idea how to improve the efficiency and operational integrity of incandescent lamps, using some refractory metal, was expressed by Alexander Lodygin. So, in 1892, the author applied for a patent (in America), which described in detail the process of manufacturing a glower that could be platinum, chrome, tungsten was also mentioned in the study as the most suitable material, although tungsten is complicate to work with. But still, tungsten was used in incandescent lamps – the tungsten powder was mixed with the starch paste, then the mass was squeezed out through the dies, the finest yarn obtained was subjected to calcination to remove the organics. But this method was not perfect enough, as there was a bit of organic material, which led to the settling of the lamp of the carbon layer on the bulb, the lamp quickly became dark.

Thanks to the creation of a tungsten filament (glower) for incandescent lamps, William Coolidge was recognized as an inventor in the field of physics. He received a little later the vice-president’s chair in the company “General Electric”, and our modern world was made a very important gift in the form of cheap, efficient, energy-saving electric lighting.