yeah. take the voltaic pile for example. it generates a continuous current. pretty fascinating in itself, but i could also build an electromagnet with it, build a simple electromechanical generator, and power a lightbulb with it. if you give me enough money and time to buy all the ingredients and figure stuff out in detail.
Eh, there were other filaments that worked well enough, I think (carbonized string or something, maybe?). It’s the vacuum that’s the real trick to keeping it from burning out too quick.
building a lightbulb is trivial, building an efficient lightbulb is more difficult. you just take a wire and embed it in glass.
and obviously i would need the assistance of some kind of goldsmith for that. (goldsmith = a smith that is capable of producing fine-grained structures)
also once people see it’s possible, somebody else will invest a whole lot of work into making it better until it is better than candles, yes, i think so. especially considering that candles used to be expensive before the modern times.
Is building a lightbulb really trivial? Glass has been around for millennia, but transparent glass wasn’t. If you didn’t have transparent glass, would you know how to make it?
When you say “embed it in glass” do you mean just wrap glass around a wire so the two are in contact? I don’t know what the advantage of that would be. You can get a wire to glow without glass, just pass enough current that it heats up to over 1000C. It would even be visible at about 600C in a completely dark room. If you have the wire in contact with glass you need to keep the temperature below the melting point of glass, which is between about 1400C to 1600C. That probably wouldn’t be better than a candle. Also, that “bulb” wouldn’t last long because of the difference in thermal expansion between metal and glass.
A typical light bulb has two things: space between the glass and the filament, and either a vacuum or something other than oxygen inside. There are 2 reasons for that. One is to allow the filament to get to a temperature that would melt glass. If there’s a space between the two, the filament can get white hot while the glass stays below its melting point. The reason for the argon or vacuum interior is that if you had an oxygen atmosphere the filament would corrode and/or erode quickly. There wouldn’t really be any point in building the “bulb” part of the light bulb without also changing the atmosphere inside the bulb. You probably couldn’t get argon gas in antiquity. You could probably get a partial vacuum, however.
IMO, the “white hot glowing wire” wouldn’t be too difficult if you could build a big enough battery. The “light bulb” would be significantly more challenging.
Even if you could explain these things, could you prove them and provide a practical application that relies on them?
yeah. take the voltaic pile for example. it generates a continuous current. pretty fascinating in itself, but i could also build an electromagnet with it, build a simple electromechanical generator, and power a lightbulb with it. if you give me enough money and time to buy all the ingredients and figure stuff out in detail.
Can you make a lightbulb?
Specifically, a lightbulb that is bright enough to be useful but doesn’t burn out so fast that candles aren’t more economic / convenient.
Gotta invent glass blowing and vacuum pumps first.
Well we’re starting from scratch here so I think we’ve got to invent the universe first.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
And discover tungsten
Eh, there were other filaments that worked well enough, I think (carbonized string or something, maybe?). It’s the vacuum that’s the real trick to keeping it from burning out too quick.
building a lightbulb is trivial, building an efficient lightbulb is more difficult. you just take a wire and embed it in glass.
and obviously i would need the assistance of some kind of goldsmith for that. (goldsmith = a smith that is capable of producing fine-grained structures)
also once people see it’s possible, somebody else will invest a whole lot of work into making it better until it is better than candles, yes, i think so. especially considering that candles used to be expensive before the modern times.
Well, candles that don’t stink at least.
I think oil lamps were more common?
Also expensive.
The history of technology is basically the history of light getting cheaper and cheaper.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-price-of-lighting-has-dropped-over-999-since-1700
Is building a lightbulb really trivial? Glass has been around for millennia, but transparent glass wasn’t. If you didn’t have transparent glass, would you know how to make it?
When you say “embed it in glass” do you mean just wrap glass around a wire so the two are in contact? I don’t know what the advantage of that would be. You can get a wire to glow without glass, just pass enough current that it heats up to over 1000C. It would even be visible at about 600C in a completely dark room. If you have the wire in contact with glass you need to keep the temperature below the melting point of glass, which is between about 1400C to 1600C. That probably wouldn’t be better than a candle. Also, that “bulb” wouldn’t last long because of the difference in thermal expansion between metal and glass.
A typical light bulb has two things: space between the glass and the filament, and either a vacuum or something other than oxygen inside. There are 2 reasons for that. One is to allow the filament to get to a temperature that would melt glass. If there’s a space between the two, the filament can get white hot while the glass stays below its melting point. The reason for the argon or vacuum interior is that if you had an oxygen atmosphere the filament would corrode and/or erode quickly. There wouldn’t really be any point in building the “bulb” part of the light bulb without also changing the atmosphere inside the bulb. You probably couldn’t get argon gas in antiquity. You could probably get a partial vacuum, however.
IMO, the “white hot glowing wire” wouldn’t be too difficult if you could build a big enough battery. The “light bulb” would be significantly more challenging.
Don’t you need to vacuum the air out of that glass so the wire doesn’t just burn up?
You’d also need to invent a power grid to make a lightbulb useful, otherwise it’s nothing more than a curiosity.
yeah i know how to build a transformator
Would you know where to find the relatively pure zinc and copper that you’d need for a voltaic pile?
Like that idiot genius Dr. Stone and after nobody uses it?