Visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., are seeing the space suits once worn by the men who walked the moon in literally a whole new light. The Smithsonian is the first customer to use a new kind of lightbulb that is brighter and more energy efficient and emits less ultraviolet radiation than conventional lighting.
This is the proverbial perfect lightbulb, says Michael Ury, vice president of engineering and cofounder of Fusion Lighting in Rockville, Maryland. In 1990 he put a pinch of sulfur in a quartz bulb filled with the inert gas argon and bombarded it with the kind of microwaves found in an ordinary microwave oven. The microwaves kicked the sulfur atoms into a higher energy state, and when their electrons settled back into their original orbits, they released photons--lots of them, spanning the visible spectrum.
Ury, who received funding from the Department ...
