History
In 1892, Thomas Willson discovered an economically efficient process for creating calcium carbide in an electric arc furnace from a mixture of lime and coke. The arc furnace provides the high temperature required to drive the reaction. Manufacture of calcium carbide was an important part of the industrial revolution in chemistry, and was made possible in the USA as a result of massive amounts of inexpensive hydroelectric power produced at Niagara Falls before the turn of the 20th century.
In 1895, Willson sold his patent to Union Carbide. Domestic lighting with acetylene gas was introduced circa 1894 and bicycle lamps from 1896.
The first carbide mining lamp developed in the United States was patented in New York on August 28, 1900 by Frederick Baldwin. Another early lamp design is shown in a patent from Duluth, Minnesota on October 21, 1902. In the early 1900s, Gustaf Dalén invented the Dalén light. This combined two of Dalén's previous inventions: the substrate Agamassan and the Sun valve. Inventions and improvements to carbide lamps continued for decades. On March 10, 1925 Andrew Prader of Spokane, Washington was granted a United States Patent, number 1,528,848 for certain new and useful improvements for Acetylene Lamps.
After carbide lamps were implicated in an Illinois coal-seam methane gas explosion that killed 54 miners, the 1932 Moweaqua Coal Mine disaster, carbide lamps were less used in United States coal mines. They continued in use in the coal pits of other countries, notably Russia and Ukraine.
In the birth of the cinema of Iquitos, a carbide lamp was used as light support to project the first film in the Casa de Fierro, in 1900.
Read more about this topic: Carbide Lighting
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)