The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Turning Night Into Day
If electricity is used for lighting there will be no danger of asphyxiation or explosions.
And even when there is nothing wrong with the gas-pipes, gas vitiates the air in a room. Not only gas does this, any kind of lamp in which combustion takes place will do it. For you remember that air is necessary for combustion. Fresh air goes into the lamp and comes out vitiated, no longer good for burning. The same thing happens when we breathe; we take in fresh air and breathe out bad air. A 25-candle power kerosene lamp uses up about 55 pounds of air in an evening. A person breathes only about 7 pounds in the same length of time. That is, one such lamp in a room is equivalent to 8 persons.
You can see from this that the more people there are in a room the harder it is to breathe, because the fresh air gets less and less.
Electricity is entirely different. Although from force of habit we say that an electric lamp "burns," in reality there is no combustion taking place in it. Therefore it cannot vitiate the air.
Electricity has another big advantage: the current can be taken a long way—hundreds and hundreds of miles. One big electric power-station can light up a whole countryside. No wonder that nowadays electricity is being used everywhere, even in the most remote villages which were only recently using the old kindle-light.
An Electric Lamp Which Had to Be Lighted
Before an economical electrical lamp had been invented, a certain scientist, Nernst, invented a very curious type of lamp. In place of carbon he used not a metal filament but a rod made of magnesium. Magnesium is a substance which does not burn, that is, it is not affected by air. This was precisely what was needed. But the great drawback was that magnesium is a conductor of electricity only when it is hot. So these first Nernst lamps had to be started with a lighter, like a kerosene lamp. Later Nernst improved on this method of lighting his lamp. But these Nernst lamps are very rarely used. They are too expensive.
The Biggest Lamp in the World
Not long ago a German scientist, Beck, built an electric arc lamp of 2,000,000,000 candle power. At a height of 20 miles above the earth this lamp would give a light equal to that of the full moon. Even at the same distance from us as the moon it would appear to us like a star visible to the naked eye.
The carbon rods in this lamp are heated to 7500° C, that is, hotter than the sun, whose temperature is calculated to be about 6000° C.
This lamp is two metres in diameter.
