Abstract
The achievement of Thomas Alva Edison was not only the manufacturing of the first useful electric lamp. Above all, his success was due to his vision regarding the distribution of light. Lighting was only viable if electricity was generated at a central point and from there distributed to the public in the same way as gas had been supplied years earlier. For that purpose Edison designed - in spite of all the criticism of his ideas on the distribution of light - an incandescent lamp of high resistance. These high resistance lamps - connected in parallel and connected to a high voltage from a dynamo - could be switched off independently. In this way Edison tried to optimize the total lighting unit consisting of supply voltage, switch and light source.
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Van Vliet, J.A.J.M. (1988). From Light Source to Lighting Unit. In: De Almeida, A.T., Rosenfeld, A.H. (eds) Demand-Side Management and Electricity End-Use Efficiency. NATO ASI Series, vol 149. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1403-2_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1403-2_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7127-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-1403-2
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