Light Yesterday and Tomorrow Page 87

S. G. Hibben

A firm believer in the opinion that, once informed, the public is quick to grasp new ideas, Samuel G. Hibben has spent much of the past four decades stumping the country, demonstrating the latest in lamps and lighting practices before every conceivable type of audience, from students to lighting experts here and abroad. Possessing a fertile imagination coupled with a fine engineering talent, he has probably done as much as any other man to spread good lighting practices and demonstrate the versatility of lighting. Widely known for his unique demonstrations, Hibben’s words carry the authority born of experience.

Hibben’s start in the lighting field was business-like, if hardly constructive. At the age of ten he discovered that he could net a tidy profit by collecting burned-out carbon-filament lamps, smashing them, and salvaging their platinum leads. At this enterprise he averaged about five dollars a summer—not bad for a junior scientist.

After his graduation from Case, Hibben spent several years with the MacBeth Glass Company in Pittsburgh, designing lighting glassware, lenses, and reflectors; then he spent two years as a consulting engineer before coming to Westinghouse in 1916. His lighting career has been interrupted only by an interlude as a captain in the army during World War I; much of this interval was spent in helping to design the first portable searchlight for anti-aircraft use.

After establishing and developing what is now the present Commercial Engineering Department, Hibben was selected as Director of Applied Lighting for the Westinghouse Lamp Division, the position he now holds. Here he functions as ambassador-at-large on all lighting activities, keeping in touch with new developments and following them through to final application. Recently his tireless efforts toward better lighting were expanded by election to a vice-presidency in the Illuminating Engineering Society.

Despite his occasional flights into the realm of prophecy, Hibben is definitely a practical engineer. Witness his part in the development of the first system of transcontinental airway beacons, the underwater lamp for salvage operations, modern floodlighting, and semi-indirect lighting. Indeed Hibben is one of those rare individuals who can keep both feet solidly on the ground while allowing his soaring imagination freedom in the scientific stratosphere.

converting only the short-wave radiation to longer waves.

Phosphors that would work in the opposite direction — namely, converting long-wave energy or heat to short-wave visible light — have not been discovered, and may not be possible. As a single action, this would seem truly and fundamentally impossible! But wait! The “impossible” often turns out to be a task that requires just a little longer to do! Let us not forget that numerous attenuated gases can be ionized or excited by long waves of, say, radar energy, causing these gases to emit considerable light.

Furthermore, on the future horizon is glimpsed the possibility of utilizing a phosphor material — perhaps an inorganic sulphide — on walls or ceilings of rooms, or incorporated into plastics and building materials. This unknown or unperfected phosphor could conceivably absorb and later re-emit what is now the wasted ultraviolet as well as some visible portions.

A somewhat fantastic but enticing idea is that natural daylight can be absorbed into a species of light “storage battery,” peculiar paints or dyes emitting a luminous radiation after sundown. Already known are phosphorescent materials that, after exposure to almost any kind of light, and especially sunlight, glow for several hours after they have been excited. A slower rate of light “decay” is needed. Generally these materials repeat the process indefinitely without deterioration. The efficiency of this method is undoubtedly low, but the inexhaustible supply of exciting energy in sunlight leads to the hope that some day these storage batteries of light might at least meet the needs of safety markers for hazardous areas, such as on highways, on vehicles, or in paving blocks.

The span of man’s life is on the increase. It should and can be longer. This desire in turn should lead to the more universal acceptance and usage of fluorescent types of sun lamps for space irradiation, and the use of ultraviolet Sterilamps and germicidal lamps for the purification of air and food products and the suppression of infectious diseases. Today it is easily possible to incorporate either long-wave (3000 Angstrom) or short-wave (2500 Angstrom) ultraviolet emission into light sources that heretofore gave us radiation only within the visible spectrum. However, it seems more flexible to segregate our sources of radiant energy into certain classes, and produce lamps designed to emit a single selected group of radiation rather than to obtain all wavelengths from a single lamp.

Tomorrow’s lighting needs could be fulfilled with the many thousands of types, sizes, and colors of today’s illuminants, were it but possible to know and to use available lighting tools to their fullest extent. For example, white-light illuminants having efficiencies of 200 lumens per watt are theoretically possible, but progress does not await this attainment. Full efficiency of light production is by no means the whole problem. The improvement of human eyesight physiologically, and the betterment of human vision through higher levels of lighting, lower levels of glare, and pleasing varieties of color suggest that tomorrow’s job is to put today’s man-made light to work more abundantly and more intelligently.

Man’s need for more and better light obviously will require vast amounts of research and development — and education! The new age of lighting is thus scarcely under way; its future stretches on to remote horizons.