Hello and welcome to No Effort November,
a\hseries [rushed mumbling]
Gonna be lots of flickering lights throughout this video, fyi.
This,
[click]
if not the weirdest light bulb ever made, is certainly the wildest light bulb ever\hmade.
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.
This novelty light\hbulb was produced by Kyp-Go Incorporated,
the company founded by Bob Kyp.
He was dedicated\hto the preservation of carbon filament light bulbs
and in 1950 founded his company (right\hhere in the Chicago area, as it happens) which manufactured reproductions of various antique\hlight bulb designs.
But in 1964, he had an idea.
And it wasn’t this.
It was this!
This bulb,\hcalled the Gas Glo, was an attempt to produce a realistic flame effect for old-looking but\hstill electric light fixtures.
I’ve long had a soft-spot for this sort of thing -
you may\hrecall I covered neon flicker flame lamps in the past.
While they’re really not useful for any\h amount of illumination and the flame effect is...
uh, not terribly realistic it’s\hstill a neat idea.
These days, since LEDs and microcontrollers are so stinking cheap
these new light bulbs are gaining in popularity which are…
well they’re something.
I don’t\hlove them - these aren’t warm white diodes, they’re amber, so they create terribly\hunpleasant lighting,
plus you can usually notice a pattern in their behavior pretty quickly, so I think\hthere’s lots of room for improvement.
I probably have unrealistically high standards,\h though, since growing up and visiting the Disney parks
I was entranced by how they managed to make\h antique lanterns look like there was actually a flame in there.
I even tracked down a product\hcalled SimFlame which is a thing - if not the thing - which makes that particular magic happen.
This is a plug-in version of the SimFlame
and really all it is is a fancy dimmer switch which\h randomly and subtly changes the brightness of an incandescent light bulb.
Incandescent filaments\hoffer a natural shift in color emperature as they dim down
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.
Jerry’s Electronics\his still around and you can still order these if you like,
in fact they’ve been updated to\hsupport LED light bulbs, and I put a link in the doobly-do.
Though, as I later discovered when\hI started getting into actual hurricane lanterns,
this effect isn’t actually representative of the\h sort of light output a burning oil lamp creates.
This, though, it actually is.
The flicker\hof an oil lamp is quite subtle and, well, this light bulb has a very subtle flicker.
It\halso produces about as much light with the same character that a real oil lamp does.
And how\his it doing that?
Well, through the magic of buying two of them, I have this clear version\hof the same bulb which lets us look inside.
Before I switch it on, and this is going to\hbe very hard to see but hopefully you can,
you’ll notice the filament is very long and is sticking up into the point of the vaguely flame-shaped glass bulb.
And\hit’s free to move around a little bit.
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.
That is a magnet.
Just a simple magnet.
Now, you may know that when current flows through a wire it generates\ha magnetic field.
And the filament in this light bulb is a wire which will have current flowing\hthrough it.
So once we switch it on, the filament will create a magnetic field
which will interact\hwith the magnet and create an attractive or a repulsive force which moves the filament relative\hto the magnet.
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,
the direction\hthe filament will move will constantly reverse.
And that produces this effect.
The filament\his essentially vibrating thanks to the magnet and alternating current.
The shape of the bulb\hrestricts the filament’s movement to just a small back and forth motion -
you can actually hear\hthe filament hitting the glass if you listen real close.
[faint tinkling]
And while the effect is pretty tiny, it’s\hsignificant.
The source of the light is physically moving and so, even though the filament is not\hchanging in brightness,
the amount of light which leaves the bulb in any given direction is always\hjust a little different.
Even staring directly at this clear bulb, it does kind of look like there’s\han actual flame in there.
And the frosted bulb makes the effect…
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.
But then, in 1968, Bob decided to let things\hloosen up a bit.
The Balafire bulb is basically the same thing as the Gas Glo bulbs - it even has\hthe same roughly flame-shaped filament.
But the matching flame shape of the glass envelope was\hswapped for a simple spherical globe.
While the Gas Glo bulb physically prevents the filament\hfrom moving very far,
the globe of the Balafire is large enough that the filament can never touch\hit.
And the result…
is that.
An absolutely wild light bulb where the filament is just flying all over the place.
It really does look quite a lot like a small fire inside of that light bulb,\h and they came in several different colors.
This really is a mesmerizing effect and you\hreally lose quite a lot of time just staring at one of these,
especially if under\hthe influence of the sort of substances that the box design might remind you of.
I have this, of course, just in a standard lamp socket but these were often displayed in\hfixtures specially designed specifically to display them.
They might take the form of a mirrored\h box to let you see the lamp from all sides,
and some pretty groovy acrylic cuboids\h were out there which fit a globe lamp just perfectly and served as a sort of…
shrine?
I dunno, I’m not old enough to have been there.
And speaking of mirrored [clicks off]
you might have noticed\hthat the glass is somewhat mirrored.
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
is literally the same exact thing as the Gas\hGlo bulb.
If you could see clearly into the bulb, it would look identical.
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.
You tell me.
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
until you remember that the tiny, fragile filament is flying around every which way\hwith gusto.
Ever heard of metal fatigue?
This is both really cool to watch and really painful!
That’s not good for the health of the filament,
though for what it’s worth the patent mentions\hthat an aged filament
(one which has already been subjected to higher-than-normal voltage and thus had a burn-in period) is preferred.
I’m sure that helped keep these\h things from burning out too early.
Then again, I found some forum posts about\hthese where someone claimed they had used\htheirs for many thousands of hours.
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 -
that’s quite dim and evaporation of tungsten is going to be\hvery, very slow.
But it relies on getting very lucky as far as how sturdy the filament was\hin your particular bulb.
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,
instead the\hfilament just mechanically fails at some point.
And, well, that’s really all I've got for you today.
Just\ha couple of weird old light bulbs.
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.
I’m assuming there was a logistical\hor technical reason for that -
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 -
but\hit was still nice that it was revived.
Now, these are collectors items and are worth around\h$100 each.
I believe Kyp-Go is now defunct, I only found a web presence via the Wayback\hMachine.
But I was genuinely delighted to learn that there actually was a Disney Parks connection\hthis whole time -
apparently Kyp-Go was who was making the antique carbon filament bulbs in\huse in the theme parks and certain attractions.
Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention\hmy channel icon.
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.
Or maybe what it was a decade ago.
I don’t remember when it peaked.
Anyway, it looks\hlike they, too, are defunct.
Which is kinda sad, they had some of the best reproductions.
Including\ha glass-tip.
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.
And that means they tend to last a lot longer than they seem like they should -
it’s like being\hpermanently on a dimmer set quite low.
However, they’re horribly inefficient and produce an\h extremely warm light and so while they are nice in a few decorative spots,
they’re not great at all\hfor general illumination.
Uh, but anyway, the end.
♫ wildly smooth jazz ♫
…for old-looking but still electric light\hbulbs.
Light fixtures!
[clears throat]
I don’t love them, these aren’t warm white\hdiodes, they’re amber so they create… terr…
ohf shoot.
…thing if not the thing\hwhich makes that par… crap.
I have this of course just in a standard\hlamp socket just inst… ffthwhat?
But I was genuinely telighted to lear - ahhhhhh
Yeah, we’re gonna be done by the end of the day!
Oh,
that reminds me because this\hone was so short I dunno how many bloopers there are going to be.
There\hwere a few, uh but I’m just recording this section
in case I have to pad it\h out into the point where I normal cu-
that's some movie magic for ya.
cutting right when i said cut.
i'm so clever makin' funnies like that