Origins
Charles Wheatstone observed the spectrum of an electric discharge in mercury vapor in 1835, and noted the ultraviolet lines in that spectrum. In 1860, John Thomas Way used arc lamps operated in a mixture of air and mercury vapor at atmospheric pressure for lighting. The German physicist Leo Arons (1860–1919) studied mercury discharges in 1892 and developed a lamp based on a mercury arc.
The first mercury vapor lamp was invented in 1901 by American engineer Peter Cooper Hewitt. Hewitt was issued U.S. Patent 682,692 on September 17, 1901. In 1903, Hewitt created an improved version that possessed higher colour qualities which eventually found widespread industrial use. The ultraviolet light from mercury vapor lamps was applied to water treatment by 1910. The Hewitt lamps used a large amount of mercury. In the 1930s, improved lamps of the modern form, developed by the Osram-GEC company, General Electric company and others led to widespread use of mercury vapor lamps for general lighting.
Read more about this topic: Mercury-vapor Lamp
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)