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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."
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
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
...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
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.
Yes but it's great for preventing murder mysteries!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
As neat as this feature is, I certainly wouldn't want it in my house.
Correct, it'd be a horrible addition to a standard house. In some circumstances, where the lights never turn off, this adds another level of safety.
For example, I work in a bizzare housing complex near a Canadian public university. There are no windows, few doors and in many hallways absolutely zero sources of external light. While we do have emergency lights for power outages, tubes like these would certainly be useful to give confidence that one could count on a very low level of light to navigate within the first hour or so of a blackout.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
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.
Sheesh! Those Japanese have a different word for Everything!
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.
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.