A report on Incandescent light bulb

A 230-volt incandescent light bulb with a medium-sized E27 (Edison 27 mm) male screw base. The filament is visible as the mostly horizontal line between the vertical supply wires.

A scanning electron microscope image of the tungsten filament of an incandescent light bulb

Original carbon-filament bulb from Thomas Edison's shop in Menlo Park

Alexander Lodygin on 1951 Soviet postal stamp

Carbon filament lamps, showing darkening of bulb

Historical plaque at Underhill, the first house to be lit by electric lights

Comparison of Edison, Maxim, and Swan bulbs, 1885

Edison carbon filament lamps, early 1880s

by Thomas Edison for an improved electric lamp, 27 January 1880

Hanaman (left) and Just (right), the inventors of the tungsten bulbs

Hungarian advertising of the Tungsram-bulb from 1906. This was the first light bulb that used a filament made from tungsten instead of carbon. The inscription reads: wire lamp with a drawn wire – indestructible.

Spectrum of an incandescent lamp at 2200 K, showing most of its emission as invisible infrared light.

Xenon halogen lamp with an E27 base, which can replace a non-halogen bulb

Thermal image of an incandescent bulb. 22–175 °C = 71–347 °F.

Spectral power distribution of a 25 W incandescent light bulb.

Destruction of a lamp filament due to air penetration

The 1902 tantalum filament light bulb was the first one to have a metal filament. This one is from 1908.

Close-up of a tungsten filament inside a halogen lamp. The two ring-shaped structures left and right are filament supports.

Incandescent light bulbs come in a range of shapes and sizes.

Left to right: MR16 with GU10 base, MR16 with GU5.3 base, MR11 with GU4 or GZ4 base

40-watt light bulbs with standard E10, E14 and E27 Edison screw base

The double-contact bayonet cap on an incandescent bulb

The Centennial Light is the longest-lasting light bulb in the world.

$Various lighting spectra as viewed in a diffraction grating. Upper left: fluorescent lamp, upper right: incandescent bulb, lower left: white LED, lower right: candle flame.$

Electric light with a wire filament heated until it glows.

- Incandescent light bulb

77 related topics with Alpha

Thomas Edison

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American inventor and businessman.

Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory, reconstructed at Greenfield Village at Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan

Photograph of Edison with his phonograph (2nd model), taken in Mathew Brady's Washington, D.C. studio in April 1878

Thomas Edison's first successful model of light bulb, used in public demonstration at Menlo Park, December 1879

U.S. Patent #223898: Electric-Lamp, issued January 27, 1880

The Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company's new steamship, the Columbia, was the first commercial application for Edison's incandescent light bulb in 1880.

Extravagant displays of electric lights quickly became a feature of public events, as in this picture from the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition.

Thomas A. Edison Industries Exhibit, Primary Battery section, 1915

Share of the Edison Storage Battery Company, issued October 19, 1903

Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone, respectively. Ft. Myers, Florida, February 11, 1929

Portrait of Edison by Abraham Archibald Anderson (1890), National Portrait Gallery

Thomas Edison commemorative stamp, issued on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1947

Statue of young Thomas Edison by the railroad tracks in Port Huron, Michigan. The Blue Water Bridge can be seen in the background.

These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world.

Incandescent (left) and compact fluorescent (right) light bulbs turned on

Electric light

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Device that produces visible light from electric power.

Electric light longevity and brightness testing in an integrating sphere

Sign with instructions on the use of light bulbs

A tablet at St John the Baptist Church, Hagley commemorates the installation of electric light in 1934.

Top, two compact fluorescent lamps. Bottom, two fluorescent tube lamps. A matchstick, left, is shown for scale.

The 15 kW xenon short-arc lamp used in the IMAX projection system.

A mercury arc lamp from a fluorescence microscope.

In this composite image from October 2012, human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe, the eastern United States, India, Japan and South Korea.

The cross in a circle usually represents a lamp as an indicator. (ANSI/IEEE Std 315A-1986)

The semicircular dent in a circle, which usually represents a lamp as a source of light or illumination.

Lamps are commonly called light bulbs; for example, the incandescent light bulb.

Fluorescent lamp

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Low-pressure mercury-vapor gas-discharge lamp that uses fluorescence to produce visible light.

Top: two non-integrated compact fluorescent lamps. Bottom: two fluorescent tube lamps. Both types require a ballast in the light fixture. A matchstick, left, is shown for scale.

Typical F71T12 100 W bi-pin lamp used in tanning beds. The (Hg) symbol indicates that this lamp contains mercury. In the US, this symbol is now required on all mercury-containing fluorescent lamps.

A "tombstone" style lamp-holder for T12 and T8 bi-pin fluorescent lamps

Inside the lamp end of a preheat bi-pin lamp. In this lamp, the filament is surrounded by an oblong metal cathode shield, which helps reduce lamp end darkening.

One of the first mercury vapor lamps invented by Peter Cooper Hewitt, 1903. It was similar to a fluorescent lamp without the fluorescent coating on the tube and produced greenish light. The round device under the lamp is the ballast.

Close-up of the cathodes of a germicidal lamp (an essentially similar design that uses no fluorescent phosphor, allowing the electrodes to be seen)

A germicidal lamp uses a low-pressure mercury-vapor glow discharge identical to that in a fluorescent lamp, but the uncoated fused quartz envelope allows ultraviolet radiation to transmit.

Different ballasts for fluorescent and discharge lamps

Thermal image of a helical fluorescent lamp.

A Sankey diagram of energy losses in a fluorescent lamp. In modern designs, the biggest loss is the quantum efficiency of converting high-energy UV photons to lower-energy visible light photons.

A cold-cathode fluorescent lamp from an emergency-exit sign. Operating at a much higher voltage than other fluorescents, the lamp produces a low-amperage glow discharge rather than an arc, similar to a neon light. Without direct connection to line voltage, current is limited by the transformer alone, negating the need for a ballast.

A preheat fluorescent lamp circuit using an automatic starting switch. A: Fluorescent tube, B: Power (+220 volts), C: Starter, D: Switch (bi-metallic thermostat), E: Capacitor, F: Filaments, G: Ballast

A preheat fluorescent lamp "starter" (automatic starting switch)

T12 fluorescent tubes. The first two are rapid start, (for "tombstone" and socket holders respectively) while the third is an instant-start lamp. The instant-start has a characteristic, rounded, single pin, for plugging into the spring-loaded socket holders.

A rapid-start "iron" (magnetic) ballast continually heats the cathodes at the ends of the lamps. This ballast runs two F40T12 lamps in series.

Electronic ballast for fluorescent lamp, 2×58 W

Electronic ballasts and different compact fluorescent lamps

This tube, which was turned on and off regularly, could no longer start after enough thermionic emission mix had sputtered from the cathodes. The vaporized material adheres to the glass surrounding the electrodes, causing it to darken and turn black.

Closeup of the filament on a low pressure mercury gas discharge lamp showing white thermionic emission mix coating on the central portion of the coil acting as hot cathode. the coating is sputtered away every time the lamp starts, resulting in lamp failure.

Compact fluorescent lamp that has reached end of life because of mercury adsorption. Light is produced only by the base argon fill.

Light from a fluorescent tube lamp reflected by a CD shows the individual bands of color.

The color temperature of different electric lamps

$A helical cool-white fluorescent lamp reflected in a diffraction grating reveals the various spectral lines which make up the light.$

Fluorescent spectra in comparison with other forms of lighting. Clockwise from upper left: Fluorescent lamp, incandescent bulb, candle flame and LED lighting.

Magnetic ballasts have a low power factor, when used without a capacitor, which increases current drawn by the lighting fixture.

The "beat effect" problem created when shooting photos under standard fluorescent lighting

Capacitive coupling with high-voltage power lines can light a lamp continuously at low intensity.

A fluorescent lamp converts electrical energy into useful light much more efficiently than an incandescent lamp.

A 230-volt LED light bulb with an E27 base (10 watts, 806 lumens, 3000 Kelvins)

LED lamp

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Electric light that produces light using light-emitting diodes .

A 230-volt LED filament light bulb, with an E27 base. The filaments are visible as the eight yellow vertical lines.

An assortment of LED lamps commercially available in 2010: floodlight fixtures (left), reading light (center), household lamps (center right and bottom), and low-power accent light (right) applications

An 80W Chips on board (COB) LED module from an industrial light luminaire, thermally bonded to the heat sink

Illustration of Haitz's law, showing improvement in light output per LED over time, with a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis

LEDs as Christmas illumination in Viborg, Denmark

Household LED lamp with its internal LED elements and LED driver circuitry exposed.

Disassembled LED-light bulb with switched-mode power supply circuit board and Edison screw

BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta Illumination with color mixing LED fixtures

Computer-led LED lighting allows enhancement of unique qualities of paintings in the National Museum in Warsaw.

A selection of consumer LED bulbs available in 2012 as drop-in replacements for incandescent bulbs in screw-type sockets

A 17 W tube of LEDs which has the same intensity as a 45 W fluorescent tube

LED Flashlight replacement bulb (left), with tungsten equivalent (right)

Variable color temperature LED array in a floodlight

LED lamps are significantly more energy-efficient than equivalent incandescent lamps

Joseph Swan

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English physicist, chemist, and inventor.

Carbon filament lamp (E27 socket, 220 volts, approx. 30 watts, left side: running with 100 volts)

Blue plaque commemorates Swan's invention of the electric light bulb and Underhill as the first house in the world to have electric lighting installed

Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, otherwise known as "Ediswan"

Stone tablet of Sir Joseph Wilson Swan in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, on former Electricity Board building

He is known as an independent early developer of a successful incandescent light bulb, and is the person responsible for developing and supplying the first incandescent lights used to illuminate homes and public buildings, including the Savoy Theatre, London, in 1881.

60 W incandescent light bulb with energy efficiency class E

Phase-out of incandescent light bulbs

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Governments around the world have passed measures to phase out incandescent light bulbs for general lighting in favor of more energy-efficient lighting alternatives.

The equivalent 42 W halogen incandescent light bulb with efficiency class C

Phase out of incandescent light bulbs around the world
A full ban
A partial ban
A program to exchange a number of light bulbs with more efficient types

Phase-out regulations effectively ban the manufacture, or importation of incandescent light bulbs for general lighting.

Halogen lamp

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A halogen lamp behind a round UV filter. A separate filter is included with some halogen light fixtures to remove UV light.

Xenon halogen lamp (105 W) for replacement purposes with an E27 screw base

Power of a halogen light as a function of wavelength. The colored band indicates the visible light spectrum.

A burned-out R7S form factor halogen lamp

Medical halogen penlight to observe pupillary light reflex

A halogen lamp (also called tungsten halogen, quartz-halogen, and quartz iodine lamp) is an incandescent lamp consisting of a tungsten filament sealed in a compact transparent envelope that is filled with a mixture of an inert gas and a small amount of a halogen, such as iodine or bromine.

Non-integrated bi-pin double-turn CFL with G24d plug-in base

Compact fluorescent lamp

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An electronic ballast and permanently attached tube in an integrated CFL

Emitted visible light spectrum of an incandescent lamp (mid) and a CFL (bottom)

Characteristic spectral power distributions (SPDs) for an incandescent lamp (left) and a CFL (right). The horizontal axes are in nanometers and the vertical axes show relative intensity in arbitrary units. Significant peaks of UV light are present for CFL even if not visible

A photograph of various lamps illustrates the effect of color temperature differences. From left to right:
• Compact Fluorescent (General Electric, 13 W, 6500 K)
• Incandescent (Sylvania, 60 W, Extra Soft White)
• Compact Fluorescent (Bright Effects, 15 W, 2644 K
• Compact Fluorescent (Sylvania, 14 W, 3000 K)

Energy use for different types of light bulbs operating at different light outputs. Points lower on the graph correspond to lower energy use

Compact fluorescent lamp with wall-mounted holder

Dimmable integrated helical CFL that dims 2–100%, comparable to standard light bulb dimming properties

Voltage and current for a 120 V 60 Hz 30-watt compact fluorescent lamp. Because the current is heavily distorted, the power factor of this lamp is only 0.61. The lamp takes 29 watts, but 39 volt-amperes due to this distortion.

Net mercury emissions for CFL and incandescent lamps, based on EPA FAQ sheet, assuming average U.S. emission of 0.012 mg of mercury per kilowatt-hour and 14% of CFL mercury contents escapes to environment after land fill disposal

A helical integrated CFL, one of the most popular designs in North America since 1995, when a Chinese firm marketed the first successful design.

A compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), also called compact fluorescent light, energy-saving light and compact fluorescent tube, is a fluorescent lamp designed to replace an incandescent light bulb; some types fit into light fixtures designed for incandescent bulbs.

Flashlight

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Portable hand-held electric lamp.

The angle-head flashlight on the left uses an incandescent bulb, while the adjustable angle-head flashlight on the right uses LEDs to give white, red, blue, and infrared light

Miniature incandescent bulbs for use in flashlights: The tungsten filament bulb was essential to turn the flashlight from a novelty to a useful tool.

Two LED flashlight extremes: Olight SR90, 2200 lumens (left), Foursevens Mini MLR2, 180 lumens (middle), AA battery for size comparison (right)

Miniature LED flashlight on a key chain, powered by lithium primary coin batteries

Multiple 5 mm LEDs may be used in small flashlights.

A medical halogen penlight to observe pupillary light reflex

Nonincendive flashlight for use when inspecting areas full of flammable gas

Inspection light with flexible gooseneck mounting for lamp

Flashlight in the shape of a gun (mid-20th century) from the permanent collection of the Museo del Objeto del Objeto

Left to right: 3x AA to D parallel battery converter with rechargeable NiMH AA-size batteries inserted. MY DAY vintage flashlight. It uses 1.5 V D-size batteries. Sofirn SP36 flashlight. It features a 5 V 2 A USB-C charging port to load 3.7 V 18650 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

Dive flashlight with different reflectors and collimator for LED XHP70.2

A rechargeable, programmable LED flashlight

Formerly, the light source typically was a miniature incandescent light bulb, but these have been displaced by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) since the mid-2000s.

Alternating current

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Electric current which periodically reverses direction and changes its magnitude continuously with time in contrast to direct current (DC) which flows only in one direction.

A schematic representation of long distance electric power transmission. From left to right: G=generator, U=step up transformer, V=voltage at beginning of transmission line, Pt=power entering transmission line, I=current in wires, R=total resistance in wires, Pw=power lost in transmission line, Pe=power reaching the end of the transmission line, D=step down transformer, C=consumers.

Three-phase high-voltage transmission lines use alternating currents to distribute power over long distances between electric generation plants and consumers. The lines in the picture are located in eastern Utah.

A sine wave, over one cycle (360°). The dashed line represents the root mean square (RMS) value at about 0.707.

The Hungarian "ZBD" Team (Károly Zipernowsky, Ottó Bláthy, Miksa Déri), inventors of the first high efficiency, closed-core shunt connection transformer

The prototype of the ZBD transformer on display at the Széchenyi István Memorial Exhibition, Nagycenk in Hungary

Westinghouse Early AC System 1887
(US patent 373035)

However, low frequency also causes noticeable flicker in arc lamps and incandescent light bulbs.