Fluorescent Lighting

Abstract

The fluorescent lamp employs two scientific phenomena that have long been known: that certain materials are excited to fluorescence by ultra-violet radiation, and that an electric discharge through mercury under low pressure produces a high proportion of invisible ultra-violet radiation. Knowledge of fluorescent materials dates back to the sixteenth century; it was in 1852 that Sir George Stokes discovered that some of them are excited by ultra-violet rays. Becquerel constructed the first attempt at a fluorescent lamp in 1859, when he placed fluorescent materials inside a Geissler discharge tube, but this was a crude and inefficient device. Numbers of more recent attempts were made to build lamps in which fluorescent materials were excited by the rays from a vacuum tube, but they were also inefficient and are more closely related to the television tube than the fluorescent lamp.