PERSONALITIES

Southland Times, Issue 19546, 9 May 1925, Page 13

PERSONALITIES

ELECTRIC LAMP PIONEER.

(By ‘

“Ædile.")

A few days ago on this page it was stated that no great invention owes its success to only one man and if an example were required of the manner in which cooperation produces wonderful results, one need go no further than the electric lamp which swings in most houses in these days. The highly efficient electric lamp which is freely used to-day is, of course, a vast improvement on the first bulbs turned out when electric lighting was made available for interior illumination, and the advance has been achieved through the energetic efforts of a bevy of bright brains, but even the first lamp, with which Edison’s name is associated, was the product of cooperation— not of a single manual effort. Proof of this was given the other day when the Edison Medal, instituted in 1907 and since awarded to some of the most famous men in science, was given to John White Howell at the behest of the leading electricity ace of the United States. His career goes back to the pioneer days when electricity was used for illumination - ' in the open-air only because the arc represented man’s latest word on this subject. When Howell was 21 years of age there was an incandescent electric lamp, but, while he still an undergraduate, he heard ~ a strange tale from a brother of his who had visited Menlo Park. Thomas Edison, there, had succeeded in “sub-dividing the electric light.” There had been arc lights since Sir Humphry Davy’s time, but they were fierce, boisterous, outdoor things and impossible to domesticate. Men had yearned to tame the arc light and bring it into the house, and Mr Edison seemed to be finding the way. He was “burning a hairpin in a bottle” and getting light. He had even stretched a string of such bottles along a street in the park. That was in 1879. John Howell went and saw. Electricity had fascinated him in college, perhaps because so little was known about it. He returned to Stevens College and wrote the first recorded thesis on “The Vacuum Lamp.” By 1881 he had joined the Edison staff as a, technician. The men in the little workshop called him “the Professor.”

Edison, meanwhile, had taken two long steps forward. His earliest “bottles” had been in two pieces, cemented together, the idea being that when the frail filament of carbonised bamboo fibre burned out, the halves of the lamp could be pried apart, a new filament inserted, the lamp re-exhaust - ed and the glass made to do service again. A perfect vacuum in such a lamp was impossible. therefore, Mr Edison gave up the praiseworthy notion of saving glass and adopted the one-piece bulb. Moreover, he had hung his lamps in houses without having to call out the Fire Department. Electric light had been brought indoors at last. The first factory for making his lamps was started in Harrison, New Jersey, in 1880. It was small, the work was slow. The young “professor,” even with the expectation of a long life before him, could have had little hope of solving the multitude of problems that lay ahead. For example, a mercury pump of those days took five hours to exhaust air in a single lamp; that is why a lamp sold for about eight times the present-day price. Again, mercury is costly stuff—and it is poisonous. The pumps had to be speeded up and the workers had to be protected from sickness. .Mr Howell perfected the pump so that it would do the required work in half an hour. Still the plant was mercurious.. Word came of an invention in Italy that would exhaust a lamp without mercury. “Go and get it. Catch the first boat,” the company told Howell. It meant that two young people whose wedding invitations were ready to mail had to scratch out the engraved date and write in an earlier one. They did.-not turn back from their wedding journey until they had found the Italian inventor, in an Alpine' village, and bought his invention. One of Howell’s most important “con - tributions toward the development of the incandescent lamps,” for which he has lately been honoured, is the improvement of the method bought from the Italian inventor until one pump to-day will exhaust 300 lamps an hour, as against the old rate of one lamp in five hours. Another of his “contributions!’ is a method of making a cellulose filament to take the place of the hand-made filament of bamboo. It enables ten persons to do the work that once required 850. It was Mr Howell, again, who brought the first tungsten lamps to America. Four inventors in Germany claimed the discovery. Howell bought the American rights of all four of them, left them to fight out their quarrel in the German Courts and sailed for home. He came down the gangway carrying those first tungsten lamps in his hands; he would not trust the perishable things’to any porter. In addition Howell also proved highly valuable to the Edison Company when he saved the firm’s patents. This occurred when he was a young man. Other firms began making lamps like Edison’s and the firm took steps to protect its rights by a series of actions for injunctions. The defence of the leading rival was that Edison’s patents on file at Washington did not describe accurately, as required by law, the process of manufacturing the lamp so that it was impossible to make the lamp from the Edison directions, therefore the patents could not be sustained. When the line of defence was known, the company men set men to work testing the Edison formula. They were unable to make a lamp from it. Outside experts, too, assured the company it could not be done. Young Howell locked himself in the laboratory for two days and came forth with lamps made as the formula specified. His testimony in Court won the case, and he had “arrived.” It is his pride that he can number among his friends to - day the members of the great firm that he once defeated. It can be said, safely, therefore that in the pioneering days John White Howell made many “important contributions toward the development-of the incandescent lamp” and incidently toward the fortunes of the Edison Company. He deserved the medal.