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LiD
FEB/MAR
2016
18
H
ave you ever have one of those flash-backs
where you tick off your teacher and she sets
you an enticing essay topic as punishment?
You know the ones: the inside of a tennis ball; the
aerodynamics of a gecko’s toenail; my life as a light-
bulb. A topic designed to give you perspective on
your sins, the vastness of the universe, and your
insignificant part therein.
So, with a backward glance over my shoulder to
where my teacher is standing with the old yellow
ivory ruler she used to punish me, let me begin.
My entire house is filled with low-energy com-
pact fluorescent lamps, except for two fittings: one
over the dining-room table and the other over the
main bedroom.
Whenever I switch on either of these two lights,
the local electricity generators spring into action to
add fundamental new capacity to the grid lest the
whole thing collapse, and my bank-manager springs
a surprise charge onto my overdraft.
Each of these lamps contains a delicate and
intricately-laced squirrel cage tungsten filament,
hand-knotted by skilled Mesopotamian artisans,
within free-blown glass enclosures made from
silica scraped from the walls of the caves beneath
the Vatican. Each light draws an astonishing 60W,
and offers a very warm white light with a colour
temperature of 2700 K, even such as the light that
graced our antediluvian forebears as they strode
bravely beneath the sunshine.
My wife loves them.
Which is a pity, because incandescent lamps
are gradually being legislated out of existence in
favour of LEDs and fluorescents.
Except for some new research coming out of
MIT, that is.
In ‘Tailoring high-temperature radiation and the
resurrection of the incandescent source’, Ognjen
Ilic, Peter Bermel, Gang Chen, John Joannopoulos,
Ivan Celanovic, and Marin Solja
Č
i
Ć
of the Research
Laboratory of Electronics at MIT have taken an ap-
proach to improving dielectric coatings and applied
them to incandescent lighting.
A standard incandescent lamp is manufactured
from a tungsten filament. When current passes
through, it promptly heats up to about 3000 K
Incandescent lamps
not quite dead
by Gavin Chait