Visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., are seeing the space suits once worn by the men who walked the moon in literally a whole new light. The Smithsonian is the first customer to use a new kind of lightbulb that is brighter and more energy efficient and emits less ultraviolet radiation than conventional lighting.
This is the proverbial perfect lightbulb, says Michael Ury, vice president of engineering and cofounder of Fusion Lighting in Rockville, Maryland. In 1990 he put a pinch of sulfur in a quartz bulb filled with the inert gas argon and bombarded it with the kind of microwaves found in an ordinary microwave oven. The microwaves kicked the sulfur atoms into a higher energy state, and when their electrons settled back into their original orbits, they released photons--lots of them, spanning the visible spectrum.
Ury, who received funding from the Department of Energy, developed a bulb with its own tiny microwave generator--the same as the one in your microwave oven, except a bit more ruggedly built. The light is so bright that 94 mercury and incandescent lamps in the Smithsonian’s Space Hall were replaced this past October with just three of Ury’s sulfur bulbs. The new bulbs provide three times the light and use 25 percent less energy, and their low level of ultraviolet light doesn’t harm the moon suits or other items on display. Since the sulfur bulbs have no filament or electrodes, they should last a long time without wearing out. We’ve run these bulbs almost 10,000 hours in test cases, and there’s no wear and tear, says Ury.
Fusion Lighting expects the bulb to catch on in sports arenas, malls, factories, and warehouses within the next five years. It may take longer, however, to reach the home. The lightbulbs in these demonstrations produce approximately 450,000 lumens, says Ury. Your average incandescent bulb produces 1,700. So we’d have to make them much smaller. And much cheaper. But it’s possible.
