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GE film includes the world’s largest light bulb, 50,000 watts using 1.5 pounds of tungsten filament, and the world’s smallest light bulb (as of 1949). Film composites live action and animation. Produced by Raphael G. Wolff. Nearly complete version of a film previously uploaded as a 12min clip.
“Light may be one of the many things you take for granted in life. But if you have ever been in the dark about light, you’ll not be for long when Professor J. Lumen Lightly, an animated character who lives in a G-E light bulb, takes a charming little girl named Nancy—and you—on a magical tour into every corner of living that light enters. Through his magic Nancy enters the Professor’s light bulb to get a close-up of the filament that makes a light bulb light. They go under the sea to watch a diver use his special bulb—and see other types of light bulbs in action—in coal mines, in homes, offices, stores, factories. Light is a part of every lane of transportation—of every field of business and industry—a part of all education—of every home. This film will help you appreciate its importance as never before.”
Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Wikipedia license:
An incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is an electric light which produces light with a filament wire heated to a high temperature by an electric current passing through it, until it glows (see Incandescence). The hot filament is protected from oxidation with a glass bulb that is filled with inert gas (or evacuated). In a halogen lamp, filament evaporation is prevented by a chemical process that redeposits metal vapor onto the filament, extending its life. The light bulb is supplied with electrical current by feed-through terminals or wires embedded in the glass. Most bulbs are used in a socket which provides mechanical support and electrical connections.
Incandescent bulbs are manufactured in a wide range of sizes, light output, and voltage ratings, from 1.5 volts to about 300 volts. They require no external regulating equipment, have low manufacturing costs, and work equally well on either alternating current or direct current…
Incandescent bulbs are much less efficient than most other types of lighting; most incandescent bulbs convert less than 5% of the energy they use into visible light (with the remaining energy being converted into heat). The luminous efficacy of a typical incandescent bulb is 16 lumens per watt, compared to the 60 lm/W of a compact fluorescent bulb. Some applications of the incandescent bulb deliberately use the heat generated by the filament. Such applications include incubators, brooding boxes for poultry, heat lights for reptile tanks, infrared heating for industrial heating and drying processes, lava lamps, and the Easy-Bake Oven toy… Incandescent bulbs also have short lifetimes compared with other types of lighting; around 1000 hours for home light bulbs versus 10,000 hours for compact fluorescents.
Because of their inefficiency, incandescent light bulbs are gradually being replaced in many applications by other types of electric lights, such as fluorescent lamps, compact fluorescent lamps (CFL), cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL), high-intensity discharge lamps, and light-emitting diode lamps (LED). Some jurisdictions, such as the European Union, are in the process of phasing out the use of incandescent light bulbs…
In 1802, Humphry Davy… created the first incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum, chosen because the metal had an extremely high melting point…
Thomas Edison began serious research into developing a practical incandescent lamp in 1878. Edison filed his first patent application for “Improvement In Electric Lights” on 14 October 1878. After many experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on 22 October 1879, and lasted 13.5 hours…
On 13 December 1904, Hungarian Sándor Just and Croatian Franjo Hanaman were granted a Hungarian patent (No. 34541) for a tungsten filament lamp that lasted longer and gave brighter light than the carbon filament…
