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Hacking the Fluorescent Light
DynaSoar writes "MSNBC reports on an elegant hack performed on the common fluorescent tube. By mixing phosphorescent material with the usual white fluorescent material, American Environmental Products has developed a tube that continues to glow when shut off. Originally intended for submarines, and then used in places where terrorists could disrupt services, they are also perfect for power outages, providing some light so you don't have to thrash around in the dark looking for your candles and flashlights. Since the 'hack' is inside the tube, they can also be removed from their fixtures and carried around, as well as provide light even if they're shattered."
OMG, all they need to do is put a hard-shield around the glass tube ;P
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
how do you turn these lights off.
but how is this a hack? I mean its not something we could do ourselves at home and while its really nifty I don't see its overall usefulness to the everyday person for the cost. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to install glow in the dark plastic strips along the hallways and such? Just my $0.02.
"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."
While this is a great product, I can see people like my granny going nuts over this. She can't handle the TV anymore (called me because it wouldn't work - I guess it has to be plugged in!), the telephone (has no idea how voicemail works, thinks that I am my answering machine). When lightbulbs exist that won't turn off, that might just be over the top.
Are you kidding? I think if they make it commercially available I'll replace every light in the house with these!
Glow in the dark lightbulbs is one of the best ideas I've ever heard. Think about when you're leaving a room and someone has left before you and turns out a light. No big deal you can still see. And how about everything that the blurb mentions? So quick to dismiss all of that?
These things even glow when broken, which is just mega cool. Innovation at its best.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I am installing these in my fleet of nuclear subs right away! :P
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"...used in places where terrorists could disrupt services,..."
Nothing like a little shilling for that fat government contract, yes?
...used in places where terrorists could disrupt services, they are also perfect for power outages...
Because we all know that terrorist attacks are way more common than power outages. I hate this "War on Terror." It's the major reason for doing anything at this point, and it's not a particularly good one.
Haida Manga
I always wanted a light bulb that I couldn't turn off. I suppose I could just remove the switch and connect the wires, but this solution is so much simpler.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
This is an excellent example of advancing something that we take for granted. Although the idea of carrying one of these is really bad considering the thin glass walls of the tube, as a safety device it makes sense for these to be fitted to shops, warehouses and offices.
Guys, I think the big reason this hasn't caught on already is that it would mean your lights could never be turned off instantly.
Your room would remain lit up for the few hours it takes for the glowing substance to completely discharge.
As neat as this feature is, I certainly wouldn't want it in my house.
What a bright idea!
I'll be here all night, ladies and gents!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Don't put it in the room where you sleep. Or for that matter your TV room.
And if you still live with your mom, that could possibly be the same room..
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
There's more detail on what he's doing with Patent 6,917,154. It's definately not a hack, it's just a new (and obviously expensive) process. Interesting quote:
The after-glow phosphor of the scotopic after-glow lamp of the present invention is selected with a hyperbolic decay rate dropping to approximately ten (10%) percent of its initial brightness in about six minutes and to one-tenth that in an hour.
Anyway, read up, interesting stuff.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
There's a serious lack of actual data in the articles, but my suspicion is that by putting glow-in-the-dark stuff on the inside of the tube it benefits from all the extra UV that you get inside the tube.
A fluorescent lamp glows by discharging electricity into a gas which then gives off UV. The phosphorescent coating inside the tube takes the UV and turns it into light.
The glow-in-the-dark strips also respond to UV light, but in a way that stores and releases the energy later. You could just put up strips, but only a tiny percentage of the UV light from the tubes would hit them; the rest would leak out into the room. (And they're designed to give off as little UV as possible, since it's unhealthy and wasteful; you want it as visible light.)
So by effectively putting the UV strips inside the tube, you charge them up when the light is on. You'd have to cover the walls with UV strips to get the same effect outside the lamp.
For everyday people? Probably not. Not in your home, at least, where you probably want it dark when you turn off the lights. But in office buildings, these could be a nice alternative to the emergency lights that are required in most places. No extra wiring; you just fit fancy bulbs into the existing fluorescent fixtures.
I have one in my bedroom here in Japan for the last four years. It is a ring florescent tube that glows like a night light after the light goes out. The light is made by NEC and is called Hotarukku (a play on the word hotaru, which is Japanese for firefly). It seems they launched the product in March 2000. http://www.nelt.co.jp/navi/la_shg/fre_shg.htm (Japanese) gives specs and has some pics showing the room lit with the light on and off.
This is a solution desperately looking for a problem. It isn't even a good one. It could only work in basements and office buildings, at night, if there are no windows nearby. (I presume you would be able to see your way around by the steady glow of the raging fires shining in through the broken windows.)
This was indeed a hack and so is the guy.
Didn't he ever ask himself "Why?"
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"Where's the door? how do I get out of here, it's all dark - Oh fuck, somebody unscrewed all those glow-in-the-dark lightbulbs!"
The vapour in fluorescent tubes is mercury (Hg). Very bad to breathe, and perilous to touch too (unless you wash hard, and even potent cleansers aren't designed to remove heavy metal contamination).
That's why they need phosphorescent coating in the first place: the excited Hg vapour emits UV, and it's actually the phosphors that 'fluoresce' visible EM.
Competent safety procedures include vacating the area of a fluorescent bulb break for at least ten minutes, followed by thorough cleanup and HAZMAT disposal of the materials used.
A company produces an interesting variation of a product that has been mass-produced for decades, and it's called a hack? And how did you manage to get your shiny new favourite word, "terrorist" in a summary on flourescent tubes? Let me read that again. Interesting story, puerile summary.
My motorbike travels in Chile.
After reading the tedious patent, apparently they are using strontium aluminate, not zinc sulfide. The toxicology on strontium aluminate is "This product is non-toxic". It's also reactive only with acids, and doesn't burn. Basically, about as hazardous as dirt.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Problem: Domestically produced commodity items are no longer cost competetive in the marketplace. Increased competition from overseas manufacturing is producing insurmountable pricing pressure on commodity items. Company is approaching insolvency.
Solution: Minor cosmetic changes to commodity product manufacturing process. Re-write marketing material to reflect the change, emphasis on the 'terrorist' application. Increase sale price dramatically to reflect the new 'terrorist' application.
Results: Small increase in sales volume, substantial improvement of product margins. Financial insolvency averted.
Conclusions: Terrorist hysteria is an effective marketing tool. Properly exploited in the marketing literature, the terrorist hysteria can breath new financial life into any product that is no longer producing adaquate margins through traditional channels.
Future Risk Analysis: A fundamental shift in marketing strategy brings with it inherent market risks. The major risk of this conceptual change is that the public mindset will begin to discard the 'terrorist threat', rendering increased marketing efforts in this area ineffective. This risk is deemed minimal at this time, the majority of the expenditures required to maintain the public mindset are being undertaken by the federal government, with a virtually unlimited budget for this marketing effort. This paradigm shift by our company is essentially parasite marketing where our relatively small marketing budget is being used to leverage the expenditures of the federal government. This strategy should remain effective for a minimum of one election cycle, so we should see improvements in the bottom line for at least the next 10 quarters. The primary risk moving forward is that the federal government expenditures to promote terrorist hysteria are reduced, with a resultant loss of marketplace mindset for this strategy. This is a relatively small risk moving forward, and partially offset by hundreds of companies such as our own, all focussed on re-working marketing strategies to promote and extend the terrorist hysteria.
Recommendations: Marketing budget needs to be re-allocated. Television advertising should only be purchased on networks whose news organizations properly emphasize the terrorist threat. The same for print media advertising. The marketing department needs to re-allocate human resources, emphasis on 'product efficiency' needs to be lowered, with appropriate staffing reductions. A new team needs to be established to emphasize the 'security' aspect of the product. A 'threat analyst' should be hired, and put in charge of this new team, who will be responsible for producing white papers emphasizing the 'security' aspect of the product, with particular detail on the 'terrorist' aspect.
Sheesh! Those Japanese have a different word for Everything!
I wonder how much the (powered) light output is diminished for a feature that will be used for a vanishingly small part of the useful lifetime of each tube...
In terms of annoying flicker from fluorescent lights, this will be like adding a capacitor across "noisy" DC current to smooth it out -- fluorescent light will have smoother, more natural look without the headache-inducing flicker.
Possible uses: Nightlights - turn the kids light off and it glows for a while so they go to sleep (you'd still need the little light on the way to the bathroom). Folks are willing to pay extra for baby stuff. 1 out of 5 (or 10) of the lights in a commercial or institutional (esp schools) setting. I was in a cubical farm the other day and the lights went out. A few glowing tubes would have made it much more pleasant for folks to sit around goofing off. Stairways. Hospitals - the one I worked at had to work on rewiring areas to provide emergency lights. This would be cheaper.
No, the isotope Strontium-90 is radioactive. "Regular" Strontium is not.
(and used in french toothpastes for sensitive teeth, for some reason. French sensodyne brand toothpaste works much better than English sensodyne brand toothpaste, but the English sensodyne brand toothpaste isn't slowly killing you...)
Strontium chloride is about as dangerous as table salt. You really ought to research things rather than drawing half-baked conclusions from inaccurate data.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
cool as this sounds, its over engineered, a recharble battery and battery powered bulb could do the same.
I sense a large number of Star Wars related accidents in the not too distant future.
I hate existing flourescent bulbs. They give me a headache. This phosphor which glows continuously should help to reduce flicker.
Even a much shorter-lived phosphor would be good: If one could develop a phosphor which decays at about the rate that a lightbulb filament cools down, then we get both flicker-free lighting AND essentially instantaneous turn-off.
As a former submariner, I can attest to it's usefullness on a submarine. The only places that are dark are berthing, and Control, if we are doing night ops. The cost isn't prohibitive on a submarine, so that doesn't matter. There already is a emergency lighting system in place, that runs of the battery on loss of AC, but it would be great to not need that right away, and save some of the juice in the battery.
Finally we get those cool umbrellas from Blade Runner.
You are likely to be eaten by a GRUE.
Mod parent up +1 Zork Reference
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The SrxAlxOx is not the important part though. It is what is DOPED into the strontium aluminate that is important. Note that is says Sr4AL14O25: Eu Dy. That means dysprosium and europium are doped into the matrix of strontium aluminate. THESE are the important dopants which are responsible for the extremely long phosphorescent glow times.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I've broken hundreds (I used to work in a hardware store, and we'd break old ones to get them in the dumpster).
They break like any other glass. They're actually quite a bit stronger than people realize - customers would bring them up to the counter and set them down like they were fine crystal, then we'd slap 'em together and wrap them with plastic, flip them around, and do the other end with little concern for breaking (and I've never seen one break that way).
The trick with these bulbs that once in a while they will shatter with no apparent provocation - we had that happen once with one of the tubes lighting the store. Companies sell clear plastic covers that go over them to contain the glass if it happens (and presumably to provide some protection from something hitting it).
And, despite their strength, they tend to break at the most unfortunate moments. One time we were replacing every bulb lighting the store, and the only one we broke doing it was one right over the register where customers were standing.
--RJ
All of the electrons in your lamp's strontium phosphor have returned to their ground states.
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.