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Hello and welcome to No Effort November,

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a\hseries [rushed mumbling]

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Gonna be lots of flickering lights throughout this video, fyi.

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This,

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[click]

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if not the weirdest light bulb ever made, is certainly the wildest light bulb ever\hmade.

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It’s called the Balafire and just in case a quick glance at the box isn’t clear\henough,
it’s a product of the late 1960’s and early seventies.

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This novelty light\hbulb was produced by Kyp-Go Incorporated,

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the company founded by Bob Kyp.

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He was dedicated\hto the preservation of carbon filament light bulbs

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and in 1950 founded his company (right\hhere in the Chicago area, as it happens) which manufactured reproductions of various antique\hlight bulb designs.

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But in 1964, he had an idea.

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And it wasn’t this.

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It was this!

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This bulb,\hcalled the Gas Glo, was an attempt to produce a realistic flame effect
for old-looking but\hstill electric light fixtures.

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I’ve long had a soft-spot for this sort of thing -

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you may\hrecall I covered neon flicker flame lamps in the past.

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While they’re really not useful for any\h
amount of illumination and the flame effect is...

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uh, not terribly realistic it’s\hstill a neat idea.

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These days, since LEDs and microcontrollers are so stinking cheap

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these new light bulbs are gaining in popularity which are…

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well they’re something.

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I don’t\hlove them - these aren’t warm white diodes,
they’re amber, so they create terribly\hunpleasant lighting,

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plus you can usually notice a pattern in their behavior pretty quickly,
so I think\hthere’s lots of room for improvement.

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I probably have unrealistically high standards,\h
though, since growing up and visiting the Disney parks

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I was entranced by how they managed to make\h
antique lanterns look like there was actually a flame in there.

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I even tracked down a product\hcalled SimFlame which is a thing - if not the thing - which makes that particular magic happen.

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This is a plug-in version of the SimFlame

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and really all it is is a fancy dimmer switch which\h
randomly and subtly changes the brightness of an incandescent light bulb.

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Incandescent filaments\hoffer a natural shift in color emperature as they dim down

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so if you simply frost the glass\hof a light fixture
so you can’t see the actual light bulb, it’s a very convincing effect.

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Jerry’s Electronics\his still around and you can still order these if you like,

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in fact they’ve been updated to\hsupport LED light bulbs,
and I put a link in the doobly-do.

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Though, as I later discovered when\hI started getting into actual hurricane lanterns,

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this effect isn’t actually representative of the\h
sort of light output a burning oil lamp creates.

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This, though, it actually is.

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The flicker\hof an oil lamp is quite subtle and, well,
this light bulb has a very subtle flicker.

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It\halso produces about as much light
with the same character that a real oil lamp does.

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And how\his it doing that?

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Well, through the magic of buying two of them,
I have this clear version\hof the same bulb which lets us look inside.

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Before I switch it on,
and this is going to\hbe very hard to see but hopefully you can,

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you’ll notice the filament is very long
and is sticking up into the point of the vaguely flame-shaped glass bulb.

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And\hit’s free to move around a little bit.

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What I’m sure you have noticed is the weird black\hchunk of something on a stick, positioned right in the middle of the filament.

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That is a magnet.

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Just a simple magnet.

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Now, you may know that when current flows through a wire
it generates\ha magnetic field.

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And the filament in this light bulb is a wire which will have current flowing\hthrough it.

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So once we switch it on, the filament will create a magnetic field

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which will interact\hwith the magnet and create an attractive or a repulsive force
which moves the filament relative\hto the magnet.

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But because the electricity that powers stuff in your home is alternating current,\h
where the direction of current flow is constantly reversing 50 or 60 times per second,

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the direction\hthe filament will move will constantly reverse.

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And that produces this effect.

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The filament\his essentially vibrating thanks to the magnet and alternating current.

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The shape of the bulb\hrestricts the filament’s movement
to just a small back and forth motion -

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you can actually hear\hthe filament hitting the glass if you listen real close.

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[faint tinkling]

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And while the effect is pretty tiny, it’s\hsignificant.

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The source of the light is physically moving and so,
even though the filament is not\hchanging in brightness,

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the amount of light which leaves the bulb
in any given direction is always\hjust a little different.

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Even staring directly at this clear bulb,
it does kind of look like there’s\han actual flame in there.

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And the frosted bulb makes the effect…

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well I won’t say more convincing\hbut it changes the character of the effect in a useful and pleasing way depending on what\hsort of light fixture you’re sticking it in.

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But then, in 1968, Bob decided to let things\hloosen up a bit.

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The Balafire bulb is basically the same thing as the Gas Glo bulbs -
it even has\hthe same roughly flame-shaped filament.

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But the matching flame shape of the glass envelope was\hswapped
for a simple spherical globe.

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While the Gas Glo bulb physically prevents the filament\hfrom moving very far,

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the globe of the Balafire is large enough that the filament can never touch\hit.

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And the result…

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is that.

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An absolutely wild light bulb where the filament is just flying all over the place.

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It really does look quite a lot like a small fire inside of that light bulb,\h
and they came in several different colors.

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This really is a mesmerizing effect
and you\hreally lose quite a lot of time just staring at one of these,

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especially if under\hthe influence of the sort of substances
that the box design might remind you of.

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I have this, of course, just in a standard lamp socket but these were often displayed in\hfixtures specially designed specifically to display them.

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They might take the form of a mirrored\h
box to let you see the lamp from all sides,

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and some pretty groovy acrylic cuboids\h
were out there which fit a globe lamp just perfectly and served as a sort of…

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shrine?

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I dunno, I’m not old enough to have been there.

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And speaking of mirrored
[clicks off]

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you might have noticed\hthat the glass is somewhat mirrored.

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While I can’t say for sure, I have a hunch that this was\h
done in part to hide the fact that what’s inside this

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is literally the same exact thing as the Gas\hGlo bulb.

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If you could see clearly into the bulb, it would look identical.

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Then again, it also just\hlooks pretty cool and a lot more interesting when it’s shut off than a simple red light bulb so\hmaybe I’m just being too cynical there.

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You tell me.

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The box claims these light bulbs had a life of 500\hhours which seems quite pessimistic for a lamp which is burning the filament at such a dull\hbrightness

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until you remember that the tiny, fragile filament
is flying around every which way\hwith gusto.

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Ever heard of metal fatigue?

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This is both really cool to watch and really painful!

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That’s not good for the health of the filament,

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though for what it’s worth the patent mentions\hthat an aged filament

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(one which has already been subjected to higher-than-normal voltage
and thus had a burn-in period) is preferred.

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I’m sure that helped keep these\h
things from burning out too early.

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Then again, I found some forum posts about\hthese where 
someone claimed they had used\htheirs for many thousands of hours.

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Certainly\hif the filament is being driven as gently as it is in the Gas Glo bulb
that’s not outside\hthe realm of possibility -

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that’s quite dim and evaporation of tungsten is going to be\hvery, very slow.

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But it relies on getting very lucky
as far as how sturdy the filament was\hin your particular bulb.

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These don’t “burn out” in the traditional sense where a weak spot forms\hafter hundreds of hours of pushing tungsten\halmost to its melting point,

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instead the\hfilament just mechanically fails at some point.

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And, well, that’s really all I've got for you today.

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Just\ha couple of weird old light bulbs.

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Bob Kyp passed away in 2011, but shortly before he died
Kyp-Go\hstarted up a new run of these using standard A19-shaped light bulbs.

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I’m assuming there was a logistical\hor technical reason for that -

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the mirrored red sphere looks so much cooler than just a normal\hlight bulb and I would think they would have wanted to do that again if they could have -

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but\hit was still nice that it was revived.

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Now, these are collectors items and are worth around\h$100 each.

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I believe Kyp-Go is now defunct,
I only found a web presence via the Wayback\hMachine.

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But I was genuinely delighted to learn that
there actually was a Disney Parks connection\hthis whole time -

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apparently Kyp-Go was who was making the antique carbon filament bulbs
in\huse in the theme parks and certain attractions.

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Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention\hmy channel icon.

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That is a photograph of a FerroWatt bulb - one of the newer companies\hwho got into the reproduction “Edison” bulb trend long before it exploded into what it\his now.

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Or maybe what it was a decade ago.

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I don’t remember when it peaked.

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Anyway, it looks\hlike they, too, are defunct.

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Which is kinda sad, they had some of the best reproductions.

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Including\ha glass-tip.

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For what it’s worth, though, most of those so-called “carbon filament” reproductions\h
were and still are, as far as I know, just tungsten filaments being run very gently.

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And that means they tend to last a lot longer than they seem like they should -

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it’s like being\hpermanently on a dimmer set quite low.

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However, they’re horribly inefficient and produce an\h
extremely warm light and so while they are nice in a few decorative spots,

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they’re not great at all\hfor general illumination.

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Uh, but anyway, the end.

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♫ wildly smooth jazz ♫

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…for old-looking but still electric light\hbulbs.

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Light fixtures!

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[clears throat]

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I don’t love them, these aren’t warm white\hdiodes,
they’re amber so they create… terr…

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ohf shoot.

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…thing if not the thing\hwhich makes that par… crap.

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I have this of course just in a standard\hlamp socket
just inst… ffthwhat?

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But I was genuinely telighted to lear - ahhhhhh

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Yeah, we’re gonna be done by the end of the day!

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Oh,

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that reminds me because this\hone was so short
I dunno how many bloopers there are going to be.

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There\hwere a few, uh but I’m just recording this section

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in case I have to pad it\h
out into the point where I normal cu-

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that's some movie magic for ya.

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cutting right when i said cut.

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i'm so clever makin' funnies like that