Brain Candy #93 - Let There Be Lighting

Catherine and I had a little trip to Las Vegas planned for late March - our first - and one of the places I was interested in visiting (but didn't) was the Neon Museum (www.neonmuseum.org). It got me thinking, though, about lighting. It has a fascinating history, and exciting new technologies are coming our way in the not too distant future. I did a bit of looking on the web and found enough for an article.

I won't be talking much about our current lighting mainstays - incandescent and fluorescent lights. As nice as they are, they're quite familiar to us all. For this article, I'll focus more on decorative lighting and in what we'll see as 21st century lighting technology.

My sojourn started with Wikipedia and its article for "neon." Neon lights are strangely beautiful. They aren't typically used for lighting; they are for decoration, especially for commercial purposes. Like the closely related fluorescent and sodium vapor lights, neon tubes are gas discharge lamps. The atoms or ions in the lamp are excited by an electrical discharge, and release this energy as light. The gas in such a lamp doesn't have to be neon, and it often isn't. If it is replaced with argon, instead of the reddish-orange neon glow, you'll see a bluish light. Carbon dioxide gives white light, krypton displays a silver-white light, xenon shows a blue-white light, while helium provides a straw gold light. Colored and/or phosphor-coated tubing allow for a wider variety of colors. Replace the gas with mercury and use a special tube coating and you have a fluorescent light. Take a neon light and boost the transformer current, and you have a cold cathode lamp. If you go to www.electricstuff.co.uk, you'll see a vast set of resources for all sorts of interesting electronic-oriented links, including neon and other types of lights. I especially recommend visiting the link on Geissler tubes, which were beautifully educational and entertaining precursors to 20th century gas discharge lighting. You might find it an interesting rainy day exploration to type "Geissler tube" or "neon lighting" or "neon gas colors" or other variations into Google, too.

If you ever wander through places like "Bed, Bath, and Beyond" and are somewhat observant, you've probably seen something called a "Limelite" (www.limelite.com). It's a cousin to the future star of lighting: the light-emitting diode, or LED. It is a distant cousin of the neon light, too. These devices function by electroluminescence - the direct conversion of electricity to light. Limelites aren't very bright, but they make great night lights and you can run one for a year, 24/7, for about 2 cents worth of electricity. They also are rumored to never burn out. The first ones were a bit pricy, about $10 each, but now you can get two for a bit over $6. You can also get variations from the original theme - different light color, built-in clock, dimmable, decorator versions, built-in outlets, etc. You can also get them tailored as safety lights for walkers/bikers at night, address lights, light switch lighting, etc. If you've ever had an "Indiglo" watch, it's the same technology. It is a very efficient lighting technology, but it isn't too practical when you need a lot of light. That's where the LED comes in.

The future of lighting, at least for some applications, appears to belong to the LED. I've owned a very early LED flashlight for years. It was designed for astronomers' use. The red LED light wouldn't ruin one's night vision, but it was bright enough to read by. I then acquired some early pocket-sized one-bulb lights. The blue light was very bright, but the white one was dim - it took awhile to develop an efficient white LED. Last Christmas, I was given a modern LED flashlight with a dazzlingly bright white 5-bulb light. The technology is progressing rapidly. LED share the economy of the LimeLite, although since it is much brighter, it does use more power.

An LED lightbulb today is prohibitively expensive, but that isn't expected to last much longer. They will probably always be somewhat more expensive than incandescent bulbs, but they will be long-lived, perhaps lasting forever if not abused by their power sources, physical environment, or the slings and arrows that lightbulbs will always be prey to. Look forward to them - it appears that they'll be lighting up your life within a decade. Again, there are many, many interesting sites on the Web that can provide vast numbers of details, if you're interested.

For those of you who want our impressions of Vegas: the Blue Man Group show was great. The Luxor was nice, but we would probably stay toward the center of the Strip next time (the Venetian, perhaps?). We had excellent food at Lotus of Siam, the Burger Bar, and the Monte Carlo Brew Pub, but most of the meals weren't distinguished. We walked and walked and were saved many times by the Monorail. We saw just about everything on the Strip. Now that we've seen Las Vegas, we can't wait to plan our next trip back ... to New Orleans.