Everything about Nernst Lamp totally explained
Nernst lamps were an early form of
electrically powered incandescent lamps. Nernst lamps didn't use a glowing
tungsten filament, however. Instead, they used a
ceramic rod that was heated to
incandescence. Because the rod (unlike tungsten wire) wouldn't further
oxidize when exposed to air, there was no need to enclose it within a vacuum or
noble gas environment; the burners in Nernst lamps could operate exposed to the air and were only enclosed in glass to isolate the hot incandescent emitter from its environment.
Developed by the German physicist and chemist
Walther Nernst in
1897 at Goettingen University, these lamps were about twice as efficient as carbon filament lamps and they emitted a more "natural" light (more similar in
spectrum to
daylight).
The lamps were quite successfully marketed for a time, although they eventually lost out to the more-efficient tungsten filament
incandescent light bulb.
One disadvantage of the Nernst design was that the ceramic rod wasn't electrically conductive at room temperature so the lamps needed a separate heater filament to heat the ceramic hot enough to begin conducting electricity on its own.
In the U.S., Nernst sold the patent to
George Westinghouse who founded the
Nernst Lamp Company at
Pittsburgh in
1901.
Minerals for the production of the glowers were extracted from the company's own mines at the legendary
Barringer Hill, Texas (since
1937 buried beneath the waters of
Lake Buchanan).
By
1904 a total of over 130,000 Nernst lamps had been placed in service throughout the country.
In Europe the lamps were produced by the German
Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (
AEG, General Electric Company) at
Berlin.
At the
World's Fair 1900 at
Paris the pavilion of the AEG was illuminated by 800 Nernst lamps which was quite spectacular at that time.
In addition to their usage for ordinary electric illumination, Nernst lamps were used in one of the first practical long-distance photoelectric facsimile (
fax) systems, designed by professor Arthur Korn in
1902, in
Allvar Gullstrand's slit lamp (
1911) for
ophthalmology, for projection and in microscopy.
After Nernst lamps fell into obsolescence the term "
Nernst glower" went on to be used to describe the infrared-emitting source used in
IR spectroscopy devices. (Recently, even this term has become obsolete as Nernst glowers have been largely replaced for this purpose by
silicon carbide glow bars or "
globars"
(External Link
) which are conductive even at room temperature and therefore need no preheating.)
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