The arc-lamp came into wide use for lighting large spaces like streets, stores, and public halls, but was found to be too intense for lighting smaller places like private houses. After many experiments, Edison succeeded in subdividing the electric light into the small pear-shaped “incandescent” lamps that we now see everywhere. In this kind of electric lamp the light comes from a thin “filament” of carbon, contained in a glass globe from which all air has been removed. Since there is no oxygen to support combustion, the filament may be heated white-hot by the current without being consumed.
In certain other forms of incandescent lamps that are just coming into use, the filaments are made of rare metals--osmium, tantalum, etc.--that will stand a high temperature without melting. The Nernst lamp has a filament consisting of a mixture of certain materials that has to be heated before it will conduct electricity.
Then there are the so-called “vapor” lamps, consisting of a glass tube full of conducting metallic vapor which gives out light when a current is passed through it. The best-known form is the Cooper Hewitt mercury vapor-lamp shown in Fig. 3, which gives a peculiar greenish light.
From the point of view of efficiency, the electric light, wonderful as it is, leaves much to be desired. The light always comes from a hot resistance; and whether this resistance is a mass of conducting vapor, as in the arc and vapor lamps, or a solid conducting filament, as in the so-called “incandescent” lamps, much more heat than light is produced. A needed improvement, therefore, is in the direction of obtaining a greater percentage of light for a given amount of electrical energy.
The generation of heat in electrical devices usually means wasted energy--sometimes a very serious waste, as we have just seen. There are certain kinds of electrical apparatus, however, that are designed to transform all of the electrical energy delivered to them into heat, for various industrial and household purposes.
By far the most important application of electric heat, as such, is in electric furnaces, by means of which we attain the highest temperatures known to man. The electric furnace consists of a chamber of “refractory” material, containing the substances to be acted upon by the heat, with a pair of big carbon electrodes thrust into the centre, as shown in Fig. 4, which is a picture of Moissan’s electric furnace for the distillation of metals, and supplied with heavy continuous or alternating currents. The apparatus is therefore a sort of gigantic electric arc-lamp, so enclosed that the whole of the intense heat of the arc is confined and concentrated on the smelting or other work. In many places where cheap electric power is to be had--as in the vicinity of the great Niagara Falls power-plants--electric furnaces are employed in what are known as electrometallurgical and electrochemical manufacturing processes. By their aid many metals and other substances that were formerly scientific curiosities, or entirely unknown, are produced commercially; such as aluminum, certain rare metals, and calcium carbide, from which that wonderful illuminant, acetylene-gas, is obtained.