Design
The Argand lamp had a sleeve-shaped candle wick mounted so that air can pass both through the center of the wick and also around the outside of the wick before being drawn into cylindrical chimney which steadies the flame and improves the flow of air. Early models used ground glass which was sometimes tinted around the wick. Later models used a mantle of thorium dioxide suspended over the flame, creating a bright, steady light.
An Argand lamp used whale oil, colza, olive oil or other vegetable oil as fuel which was supplied by a gravity feed from a reservoir mounted above the burner.
A disadvantage of the original Argand arrangement was that the oil reservoir needed to be above the level of the burner because the heavy, sticky vegetable oil would not rise far up the wick. This made the lamps top heavy and cast a shadow in one direction away from the lamp's flame. The Carcel lamp of 1800 and Franchot's moderator lamp of 1836 avoided these problems.
The same principle was also used for cooking and boiling water due to its 'affording much the strongest heat without smoke'.
Read more about this topic: Argand Lamp
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)