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Gallery: A Brief History of Light

: Photo: Alexander Martin, 1929We tour the history of man-made lights, from oil to arcs to neon. See how far we've come. Left: Often cited as the most profound and significant human discovery, humans finally were able to manifest light by using fire. Providing civilizations' artificial lighting needs for thousands of years by combusting fuels, fire was replaced only when electricity was discovered. : Photo: Library of CongressGas lighting was first used around the end of the 18th century. Early lamps were fueled by several different gases including methane and ethylene. Through most of the 19th century, gas made from coal was the standard. The lamp in this photo (taken around 1880-1893) may have run on natural gas, which began to replace coal gas at the end of the century.: Photo: Library of CongressKerosene lamps date back to the 9th century, but the first modern kerosene lamp was constructed in 1853 in Poland. These lamps were widely used in rural America in the 1930s. Here, a 1939 migrant worker lights a lamp using a campfire flame.: Photo: Schenectady Museum; Hall of Electrical History FoundationThe arc lamp concept was demonstrated in the early 19th century, but the technology didn't really catch on until the 1880s. Arc lamps consist of two electrodes separated by a gas such as neon, argon or xenon, which is ionized or ignited by an electric charge. The lamp shown here at General Electric's Schenectady Works used mercury.: Limelight, typically used in theaters in the 19th century, is created by directing an oxyhydrogen flame at a cylinder of calcium oxide, or lime. Though limelight has been replaced by modern electric lighting, the phrase "in the limelight" lives on.: Photo: Library of CongressAmong Thomas Edison's most influential inventions is the incandescent light bulb in 1879. Edison, shown here around 1911, had a total of 1,093 patents in the United States alone. He also held patents in several European countries. By the time he died, he had improved the life of the light bulb from around 40 hours to 1,200 hours using a filament made from bamboo.: Image: Library of CongressDuring World War I, Americans were asked to cut back on electricity use to conserve coal as demands related to the war escalated. The railroads compounded the problem by working double time as part of the war effort, leaving fewer cars to deliver coal to the country. Many people turned to wood in place of coal to keep warm through the winter.: Photo: Library of CongressNeon lights work by applying an electric charge to a sealed tube of neon gas, which causes it to glow. Neon glows reddish orange. Using other gases, such as argon or krypton, or mixing them with neon produces different colors. When neon signs were first introduced in the early 20th century, they were known as "liquid fire." This photo of the Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement was taken in 1943.: Photo: Hermann J. Knippertz/APFluorescent lamps are filled with mercury vapor, which produces light when an electric current is passed through it. The mercury atoms are excited, causing them to emit ultraviolet light, which in turn causes a phosphorescent coating on the tube to fluoresce. Both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla experimented with fluorescent lighting in the 1890s. By the middle of the 20th century, fluorescent lights became more common than incandescent lights in the United States.: Photo courtesy Mikael Martinez and the Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd DitmireThe word laser is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." A successor to the maser, which amplified microwave radiation rather than visible light, the first working laser was built in 1960 after Bell Labs developed the technology. This laser at the University of Texas at Austin has a peak output of more than a quadrillion watts of power.: Photo: emilgh/FlickrLight-emitting diodes, or LEDs, seem to be everywhere these days, from flashlights, to signs, to electronic graffiti. But they were not always the life of the party. The first LED was created in the 1920s in Russia when Oleg Vladimirovich Losev noticed that radio diodes emitted light under a current, but his discovery sat for decades without much notice. In 1962 Nick Holonyak Jr., an employee of General Electric created the first practical LED. The lights quickly became the standard for indicator lights in electronics, and as the technology advanced, they became useful light sources. Losev died of hunger in 1942 during the blockade of Leningrad, unaware of the modern sensation that would stem from his invention 60 years later. Left: The cartoon image LED placards that were part of a Boston area guerilla marketing campaign for a 2007 film set off a bomb scare. : Photo: EJP Photo/FlickrEnergy efficiency is on everyone's mind today. With a recent push from GE, compact fluorescent bulbs have become increasingly popular. Built to last up to 15 times longer than regular incandescent bulbs, they use as little as a fifth of the energy of incandescents. CFLs have some drawbacks: They emit an unpleasant hue and some versions tend to flicker when they start up -- both those problems have been addressed, so the lights perform more like classic bulbs. But the CFLs contain mercury, so they require special disposal and must be kept out of the landfill.

Reg launches Chrome-o-drome

It wasn't built in a day... Round-up It's got to be the most exciting event in science since Thomas Edison electrocuted elephants in order to try and discredit Nikola Tesla! It's like finding a Cornish-speaking Flores Hobbit nurturing a Higgs Boson particle behind an invisible garden shed! It's [get on with it - Ed]...?

Aug. 14, 1888: I Sing the Meter Electric

1888: Oliver B. Shallenberger receives a patent for the electric meter. There's no free lunch. You'll get an electric bill. When Thomas Edison started selling electricity for illumination in 1882, he charged per lamp. He soon replaced that with a complicated chemical ampere-hour meter. It was an electrolytic jar with two zinc plates immersed in a zinc-sulfate solution. Electricity flowing through the jar dissolved zinc off the positive plate and deposited it on the negative plate. Workers had to remove the electrodes every month and weigh them to see how much zinc had been transferred from one plate to the other. It was messy, it was inefficient, and it wasn't very accurate. Even though Edison also developed a motor-type meter, his interest in chemistry caused him to prefer the chemical version. Blind spot. Electrical polymath Elihu Thomson devised a walking-beam meter in 1888. It was a complicated, Rube Goldberg-type apparatus. A heating element in the circuit warmed a small alcohol-filled bottle on a seesaw lever. The alcohol warmed, evaporated and flowed into a matching bottle on the other side. When there was more alcohol in the opposite bottle, it would sink and up start heating up to reverse the process. Each time the bottles rocked, they ticked off a notch on the meter. Not exactly a robust design. Shallenberger was an Annapolis graduate who left the Navy in 1884 to join the Westinghouse company. He was working on a new arc lamp one day in 1888, when a spring fell out and landed on a ledge inside the lamp. Before an assistant could reach in to replace it, the ever-observant Shallenberger noticed the spring had rotated. He soon determined that the lamp's rotating electric fields had caused the spring to turn. Shallenberger realized he could use the effect to turn wheels in a meter to measure electrical charge. Not only could he use it, he did ... and built an alternating-current ampere-hour meter in just three weeks. The Shallenberger meter was a key part of George Westinghouse's AC electrical system. (Nikola Tesla later pointed out to Shallenberger that the induction meter was a type of AC motor.) The meter went into commercial use within months, selling 120,000 units in 10 years. The ampere is a measure of current, and the ampere-hour a measure of charge. So power companies that used these meters charged by the charge. Thomson invented a commutator watt-hour meter (that measured the energy consumed), also in 1888, and brought it to market the following year. It worked on both alternating- and direct-current systems, but fell by the wayside in the late 1890s when the induction watt-hour meter came into general use, where it remains to this day. Source: Dave's Old Watthour Meter Webpage

Gallery: Measuring the History of Electricity

: Photo: mtowber/flickrThe invention of the electric meter made it possible to bill customers for electricity, creating the incentive to build out the nation's first network for moving electrons. The Grid, the system of dumb, buzzing wires that allows power to move across the country, is so important, it topped the National Academy of Engineering's top 20 triumphs of the 20th century. This gallery tours the history -- and future -- of making you pay for juice. Some time within the next few years, you're likely to get a new type of so-called "smart meter" that will mark the first real upgrade to electrical billing since your grandparents were born. Until the 1870s, electrical power wasn't used for much aside from telegraphs and telephones. But after the Edison's improvement of the incandescent light bulb, power was suddenly much more useful. The problem was, the few metering systems that tinkerers had built up until that time didn't actually work. So Edison resorted to a low-tech method: He charged for electricity on a per-lamp basis. In modern business model terms, Edison was giving away the blades to sell the razor. He would not have received venture capital for that idea. : Photo: Great Beyond/Flickr Throughout the 1880s, various inventors thought hard about the problem of how to measure the flow of electrons through time. Edison himself tried a two-electrode chemical system in which your charge was determined by how much zinc moved from one electrode to another. Workers actually had to weigh the electrodes to determine the price you paid. Elihu Thomson developed a walking-beam meter that functioned quite like toy dunking birds (left). The heating and cooling of alcohol inside a pair of bottles caused a periodic liquid exchange that caused the bottles to rock back and forth. And that mechanical motion is what the meter measured. It was an excellent hack, but it couldn't scale. : Image: Library of Congress By 1888, a major, long-lasting dispute within the power industry was on the verge of getting settled. Edison had been promoting the use of direct-current power, despite the difficulty that the technology encountered transmitting electricity over long distances and changing the voltage. Both problems limited the uses of electricity. George Westinghouse, meanwhile, purchased a patent for a transformer that could increase the voltage of alternating-current power. With a working transformer, his company, Westinghouse Electric, was able to send power over long distances, allowing for larger, centralized power-generating stations. These stations could power factories as well as your great-grandfather's school reading lamp. But they needed to bill for it. And that's where Westinghouse employee Oliver Shallenberger came in. His design (left) paved the way for Westinghouse to purchase a patent from Nikola Tesla for an improved AC system. The modern electrical grid was about to take root. : Photo: Library of Congress With early success fueling investment in the electrical sector, a variety of new technologies began to converge to create the standard model for electrical generation and distribution in the United States. Through the 1890s, various iterations of the induction watt-hour meter were becoming standard technology. These meters measure the number of rotations that a metal disk makes in response to magnetic flux within the meter. The amount of power is proportional to the speed of the disk's revolution, so the meter can accurately measure a range of energy usage levels. In most places, this is still how your company knows how much power your home or business is drawing. Meanwhile, transmission-line technologists were steadily upping the voltage of the power lines running from ever-large power plants, like this one, to increasingly large cities filled with more and more electricity users. The higher the voltage, the better the quality of transmission over distance. By the 1920s, the percentage of two-thirds of American homes had electricity, and three-quarters of factories used electricity to power their motors. : Image: Edison Electric Institute During the Great Depression, the government began to regulate private utilities and push for getting electricity to rural areas far from urban centers through agencies like the Rural Electrification Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority. The Edison Electric Institute Bulletin had a special issue in 1942 on "entering the seventh decade of electric power." By this time, almost all Americans had access to cheap and reliable electric power, but many could remember a time when they didn't. The horsepower available to factory workers had increased from about 3 in 1914 to 6.5 in 1942, with most of the increase coming from purchased electrical power. As one professor chillingly put it, engineering advances had made 6 billion "manpower" available to the country, "equivalent to 50 slaves for each man, woman, and child." : Photo: Library of CongressWith most of the metering and transmission infrastructure in place, all electrical companies had to do was make as much power as cheaply as possible. And that's all they did. Innovation in transmission and metering largely stopped. This 1940s meter technician would probably understand most meters in use today. Most capital investment went to building power plants that could exploit the nation's ready source of cheap energy: coal. In 1949, only 84 million tons of coal wer used for electrical power production. By 1970, coal consumption by the power industry had nearly quadrupled to 320 million tons per year. Last year, American utilities burned about 1.05 billion tons of coal to make electricity. : Photo: Slightlynorth/flickrThe golden age of cheap power came to an end some time in the last decade. Coal, which made electricity cheap and abundant, also happens to generate massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which is the greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. It's widely expected that the next president will sign a law that will tax carbon dioxide emissions, as is already the case in many places around the world. The specter of energy regulation and rising natural gas, coal and petroleum prices has raised interest in new emission-free technologies like wind turbines and solar power. But the adoption of these technologies isn't as simple as it sounds. Both wind and solar -- which are abundant and clean -- will require substantial changes to the nation's transmission and billing systems. Wind and solar, unlike coal, do not produce power at the same rate at all times. If they are adopted at scale, the grid infrastructure and the meters like this one will have to be much more flexible than what we built 100 years ago. Power generation has been centralized since the very early days of the industry, but now, wind and solar open the possibility to generate power right on or near your home. But to make economic sense, we need meters and grid tie-ins that can easily accomplish this type of "reverse billing". : Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.comSo, we find ourselves in a new era of electric meter innovation. A host of companies is trying to find just the right mix of features that will satisfy utilities and provide consumers with more flexibility in how they make, buy and use power. Like everything else in the internet age, electricity-billing systems are about to make the transition from a centralized, one-way mode of operation to two-way systems that are connected to the internet. In addition to the back-end differences, the next generation of meters has received a facelift that will let consumers see their energy usage in near real-time. Of course, people have been talking about "smart meters" for years. But after years of delayed rollouts, utilities finally appear ready to scale them up. This electronic meter from Tendril is slated for a massive rollout with five major utilities that the company says will reach 2 million homes.

FBI: We Don't Have Tesla's Death Ray

The bureau releases a top-ten list of FBI myths, debunking some common misconceptions. The FBI has no X-files, didn't seize Nikola Tesla's plans for a particle weapon, and doesn't routinely spy on Americans. Wait ... what?