The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Turning Night Into Day
Light Without Heat
The Struggle with Heat
IN OLDEN times people used the same fire as a heating-stove, a cooking-stove and a lamp. This was, of course, inconvenient and expensive. Suppose you want light. Very well, you may have it. But in order to have light you must sit in a slightly heated room even though it is midsummer. And what a lot of wood you will have to burn up if you light your house in this way!
People are always looking for something new and better. For many thousands of years they got along with the inconveniences of the open fire, never realizing that it was possible to separate light from heat, the lamp from the stove.
Later, when they wanted only light, they began to burn a piece of kindling wood instead of starting a fire on the hearth. This kindle-light gave less heat than the fireplace but it was still too hot.
It wasn't so simple a matter to separate light from heat. People worked at it for many hundreds of years and are still working at it. Our electric lamp, like the simple, primitive kindle-light gives out heat as well as light. True, an electric lamp doesn't heat the room to any great extent. But just put your hand on it and you will see that it is very hot.
Why is it that we have never succeeded in separating light from heat ? The reason is very simple. We must have incandescence in order to get light. In the electric lamp we heat up a carbon or metal filament, in a gas light a Welsbach mantle, in a kerosene or oil lamp particles of carbon in the flame.
But every incandescent thing, whether the filament in the electric lamp or an ordinary poker, gives off invisible heat rays as well as visible light rays. To get rid of the unnecessary heat rays we should have to have a veritable revolution in lighting: get our light in some other way than by incandescence.
But, you say, is there really any necessity for trying to get rid of these heat rays ? The heat from an electric lamp is scarcely noticeable. It doesn't bother us in the least.
It isn't a question of our comfort or discomfort, but the fact that these heat rays, which are absolutely useless to us, cost too much. If our lamps did not give off any heat rays at all our light would be a hundred times cheaper than it is. Our electric stations would have to burn a hundred times less fuel.
