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History Of Fluorescent Tubes

Nikola Tesla

In 1856, Heinrich Geissler possibly created the earliest ancestor of the fluorescent lamp when he managed to obtain a bluish glow from a gas that was sealed in a tube and was being excited with an induction coil.

Nikola Tesla (pictured left) displayed his fluorescent lamps at the 1893 World’s Fair, the World Colombian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

In 1894, D. McFarlane Moore created the Moore lamp. This was a commercial gas discharge lamps that was meant to compete with the incandescent light bulb created by his former employer Thomas Edison. He used nitrogen and carbon dioxide which emitted pink and white light respectively, and obtained moderate success.

In 1901, a mercury-vapour lamp was demonstrated by Peter Cooper Hewitt that emitted a blue-green coloured light, which made it unfit for almost all practical uses. It did manage a much higher energy efficiency than normal incandescent bulbs and was very close in design to modern fluorescent tubes.

Eventually in 1926, Edmund Germer and his coworkers suggested that the operating pressure within the tube could be increased and that the tube could be coated with fluorescent powder, this had the effect of converting the ultraviolet light from the excited plasma into a more uniformly white-coloured light. It is Germer who is today recognised as the inventor of the modern fluorescent lamp.

Germer’s patent was later bought by General Electric and under the guidance of George E Inman, they brought the fluorescent lamp to wide commercial use by 1938.