Nernst lamp
From Freepedia
Nernst lamps were an early form of electrically-powered incandescent lamps. Nernst lamps didn't use a glowing tungsten filament, however. Instead, they used a ceramic rod that was heated to incandescence. Because the rod (unlike tungsten wire) would not further oxidize when exposed to air, there was no need to enclose it within a vacuum or noble gas environment; the burners in Nernst lamps could operate exposed to the air and were only enclosed in glass to aid in diffusing the light that was produced.
Developed by the German physicist and chemist Walther Nernst in 1897 at Goettingen University, these lamps were about twice as efficient as carbon filament lamps and they emitted a more natural light. The lamps were quite successfully marketed for a time, although they eventually lost out to the more-efficient tungsten filament incandescent light bulb. One disadvanage of the Nernst design was that the ceramic rod was not electrically-conductive at room temperature so the lamps needed a separate heater filament to heat the ceramic hot enough to begin conducting electricity on its own.
In the U.S., Nernst sold the the patent to George Westinghouse who founded the Nernst Lamp Company at Pittsburgh in 1901. Minerals for the production of the glowers were extracted from the company's own mines at the legendary Barringer Hill, Texas (since 1937 buried beneath the waters of Lake Buchanan. By 1904 a total of over 130,000 Nernst lamps had been placed in service throughout the country.
In Europe the lamps were produced by the German Allgemeine Elektricitaets-Gesellschaft (AEG, General Electric Company) at Berlin. At the World's Fair 1900 at Paris the pavilion of the AEG was illuminated by 800 Nernst lamps which was quite spectacular at that time.
In addition to their usage for ordinary electric illumination, Nernst lamps were used in one of the first practical long-distance photoelectric facsimile (fax) systems, designed by professor Arthur Korn in 1902, in Allvar Gullstrand's slit lamp (1911) for ophthalmology, for projection and in microscopy.
See also
- Globar, a silicon carbide bar used as thermal light source for infrared spectroscopy
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