History
In U.S. Patent 0,514,170 ("Incandescent Electric Light", 1894 February 6), Nikola Tesla describes a plasma lamp. This patent is for one of the first high-intensity discharge lamps. Tesla used an incandescent-type lamp globe with a single internal conductive element and excited the element with high voltage currents from a Tesla coil, thus creating the brush discharge emanation. He gained patent protection on a particular form of the lamp in which a light-giving small body or button of refractory material is supported by a conductor entering a very highly exhausted globe or receiver. Tesla called this invention the single terminal lamp, or, later, the "Inert Gas Discharge Tube."
The Groundstar style of plasma globe was created by James Falk and marketed to collectors and science museums in the 1970s and 1980s.
The idea of the popular product sold throughout the world today was invented by Bill Parker in 1970 as an undergraduate student at MIT.
The technology needed to formulate gas mixtures used in today's plasma spheres was not available to Tesla. Modern lamps typically use combinations of xenon, krypton and neon, although other gases can be used as well. These gas mixtures, along with different glass shapes and integrated-circuit-driven electronics, create the vivid colors, range of motions and complex patterns seen in today's plasma spheres.
Read more about this topic: Plasma Globe
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)