Техническое чтение для энергетиков. Бухарова Г.П. - 80 стр.

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82
only incandescent electric light – produced by some substance glowing in a vacuum
so that it cannot burn up – could ever replace gas lighting, then the universal system
of illumination in Europe and America.
Edison put his entire laboratories at Menlo Park to the task of developing such
a lamp. The most important question was that of a suitable material for the filament.
He experimented with wires of various metals, bamboo fibre, human hair, paper;
everything was carbonized and tried out in glass bulbs from which the air had been
exhausted. In the end – it is said that a button hanging loose from its thread on his
jacket gave him the idea – he found that ordinary sewing thread, carefully carbonized
and inserted in the airless bulb, was the most suitable material. His first experimental
lamp of 1879 shed its soft, yellowish light for forty hours: the incandescent electric
lamp was born.
It was, no doubt, one of the greatest achievements in the history of modern
invention. Yet Edison was a practical man who knew well that the introduction of this
revolutionary system of illumination must be properly prepared. He worked out
methods for mass-producing electric bulbs at low cost, and devised circuits for
feeding any number of bulbs with current. He found that 110/220 volts was the most
suitable potential difference and would reduce transmission losses of current to a
minimum – he could not have foreseen that the introduction of that voltage was to set
the standard for a century of electric lighting. But most important of all 'accessories'
of the lamp was the generator that could produce the necessary high-tension current.
Since Faraday's ingenious discovery of the way in which movement could be
transformed into electricity, only a small number of engineers had tried to build gen-
erators based on this principle. But none of these generators answered the particular
requirements of Edison's electric light; so he had to design his own generator, which
he did so well that his system – apart from minor improvements and of course the
size of the machines – is still in general use today.
It is little known that the first application of Edison's lighting system was on
board an arctic-expedition steamer, the Jeannette, which the inventor himself
equipped with lamps and a generator only a few weeks after his first lamp had lit up
at Menlo Park. The installation worked quite satisfactorily until the ship was crushed
in the polar ice two years later.
Edison, a superb showman as well as a brilliant inventor, introduced his electric
lamp to the world by illuminating his own laboratories at Menlo Park with 500 bulbs
in 1880. It caused a sensation. From dusk to midnight, visitors trooped around the
laboratories, which Edison had thrown open for the purpose, regarding the softly
glowing lamps with boundless admiration. Extra trains were run from New York, and
engineers crossed the Atlantic from Europe to see the new marvel. There was much
talk about the end of gas-lighting, and gas shares slumped on the stock exchanges of
the world. But a famous Berlin engineer – none other than Werner von Siemens, who
later became Edison's great rival in central Europe – pronounced that electric light
would never take the place of gas. When Edison showed his lamps for the first time
in Europe, at the Paris Exhibition of 1881, a well-known French industrialist said that
this would also be the last time.

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