Spectrums: CFL (top) has mercury’s characteristic violet and green. Incandescent (middle) spectrum is smooth with strong reds (warm). LED (bottom) has a bright peak in blue.
If only there were a light bulb as efficient as a compact fluorescent light (CFL), but without the ghastly green light and brain-eating toxic mercury. Am I asking too much? The inventors of the Electron Stimulated Luminance (ESL) lights don’t think so. A company called Vu1 plans to sell ESL bulbs in Europe and the Mideast in 2013. Vu1 lights are based on cathode ray tube (CRT) technology, are dim-able and have the cozy glow of incandescent light bulbs. How did Vu1 accomplish this magic? It helps that I know a little bit about CRTs from the days when my brother and I repaired old televisions.
The Hard Way of Learning About CRTs
Nature Abhors a Vacuum, So Do I: It was the mid 1980s. My brother glared at me in that moment between the sound of breaking glass and the horrible bang-whoosh which tugged at our eardrums and filled the room with a greenish-white cloud, Dad is gonna be mad! I didn’t have time to say, shut up! as we bolted from the room, but I knew it was my fault. I held my breath to avoid inhaling poisonous mercury fumes from the fluorescent light I had just dropped across the back of Dad’s television.
It was a 1940s vintage Admiral TV with an AM/FM radio, phonograph and a 12 ½ inch picture tube. It was nearly old enough to have displayed the last time the Chicago Cubs had won the World Series in 1945. It had been around for Elvis’s debut and the moon landings. My father had begun to restore it the night before his wedding and my brother had fully repaired it in the mid 1980s– only a few weeks before I destroyed it.
When we mustered the courage to return to the room, we saw that the fluorescent tube was intact but the neck of the TV’s picture tube had broken off. Air rushing into the vacuum had blown a hole in the screen’s phosphor coating. I wondered, what we should fear more; mercury vapors, phosphorescent dust– or Dad.
CRT televisions faded into history, but fluorescent lights continue to be my bane. Our kitchen is equipped with dimmer switches. The prison-style bare bulb fixture in our bathroom is too fragile to support heavy CFL bulbs. Some fixtures require screw base bulbs, others have bayonet, candelabra or T-50 floodlight sockets. Until recently only one style of CFL light bulbs was available in Ireland, so we installed these into as many fixtures as possible. The CFLs in recessed sockets overheated and the ones we installed in the cool damp bathroom lasted only a few months. The ones on the dimmer switch didn’t work at all. Soon I had a collection of dead CFL light bulbs, waiting for the environment minister to devise a disposal plan for the toxic mercury inside them. His eventual plan was for citizens to ‘look it up on the Internet’– so here I am. Meanwhile, this became one of the first countries in the world to ban incandescent light bulbs. Am I screwed?
How do ESL lights work?
ESLs work just like the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) in Dad’s old TV. There are differences but let me first explain how a CRT works. Inside the fragile glass neck there is a piece of metal called a cathode. The cathode is electrically heated with a filament similar to those used in incandescent bulbs. This allows electrons to ‘boil’ off of the metal’s surface.
These electrons won’t go far unless you remove the air and push many more electrons onto the cathode, giving it a negative charge. Since like charges repel, the negative electrons leave the cathode and fly towards a positively charged piece of metal near the front of the tube called an anode. This assembly is called an electron gun.
Where Do the Electrons Go?
Once you have electrons shooting out of an electron gun, you need to give them a target. In an X-Ray machine the target is a chunk of metal which stops the electrons and forces them to give up their energy as X-Rays. In a CRT, the electrons strike a phosphorescent powder, causing it to glow. Electromagnets sweep the electron beam back and forth over the screen, painting a picture.
In a color CRT, three electron beams pass through a metal shadow mask, full of holes which direct the beams to red, green and blue phosphor dots.
There is Nothing Wrong With Your Television Set
During our TV repair years, my brother and I would occasionally find one with bad horizontal and vertical oscillator tubes. This disabled the beam steering magnets which left an extremely bright dot shining in the center of the screen. ESLs don’t use a shadow mask or beam steering magnets but they do have an electron gun and a bright phosphor screen. Vu1 has taken advantage of advancements in phosphor chemistry and small, high voltage power supplies to make what appears to be an ecologically friendly light..
What about X-Rays?
One of the first things I thought of when I heard about ESLs was, I thought we were trying to get rid of CRTs. My second thought was, What about X-Rays? In 1967 a General Electric manufacturing defect resulted in TVs which emitted 10-100,000 times the X radiation considered safe. Most TVs gave off some X-Rays, color ones more so, because the electron accelerating voltage was higher, at about 25,000 volts. The shadow mask stopped some electrons, converting their energy to X rays. To filter these, old TV screens were made of thick leaded glass.
ESL’s lack of a shadow mask and relatively low accelerating voltage of 5000V means they are unlikely to emit many more X-rays than a typical CFL bulb and nowhere near as much as the sun.) ESL lights have passed Underwriter’s Laboratory X-Ray testing in the U.S.
Throw Them in the Trash? You must be joking!
There is an old joke that fluorescent lights don’t give off light, they suck up dark and the tube gets black when it’s full of dark. But they’re actually mercury vapor discharge lights. A tiny heater boils a little bit of mercury, then 100-1000 volt ‘spark’ is sent through the vapor. The resulting light has some orange, a lot of green and a strongly ultraviolet component. A fluorescent phosphor coating converts the UV to white light. The mercury in CFLs does create a disposal problem which, along with previously mentioned advantages seems to give ESLs the edge.
But I wonder why we didn’t worry about long tube fluorescents which had much more mercury and sometimes even a little bit of radioactive Krypton in their starters. One reason may be that we weren’t as environmentally aware, another is that those lights seemed to last forever. When they flickered, someone would replace the ballast transformer and they’d continue to shine. I suspect most of my CFL duds have a perfectly good tube and a failure somewhere in the ballast or equivalent electronic components. The bare mercury tube and electronics have independent failure modes so why are they not independently replaceable?
From Cradle to Where?
So which is more dangerous, phosphor dust or mercury? Shards of glass imploding through a high vacuum or radioactive Krypton? I don’t know. But it bothers me that anyone is suggesting that a new technology is “trash bin safe.” The Wall Street Journal estimates that there are about 12 billion light bulbs in the world.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on 8 hours of light/day and a typical lifespan of 6000 hours gives a replacement interval of 750 days. ESLs are longer and heavier than CFL or incandescent bulbs. They weigh about a pound so that would come to 16 million pounds of e-waste per day. Some jurisdictions forbid disposing of CRTs and if Canada’s $0.25 per pound e-waste charge is typical, ESL disposal could cost the world millions of dollars per day.
I Take My Europium, Shaken, Not Stirred, and Very Very Rare
Vu1’s SEC filing says that their blue and green phosphors are zinc based and that the red phosphor, necessary for ESL’s warm reddish-yellow light, is based on the rare-earth element Europium (Eu).
Grab a magnifying glass and have a close look at your computer’s LCD screen here: . . . . . . . . . . . .
Those tiny red squares glow with the light of Europium. Grab a Euro note and you have some Europium. But if you’d invested in Europium rather than Euros, you’d be up about 1000%, the price of this rare-earth has soared to over $3000/kg. Pure europium costs upwards of $1,300,000/kilogram.
The thing about rare-earths is that they’re– well, rare. There are only about 150,000 tons of europium in the world. If that sounds like a lot, consider this. If ESLs were made of pure europium, we could throw away the entire world’s supply in 18 days. If container ships burned europium instead of oil, a single ship could use up the global supply in less than two years.
So you really don’t want to be throwing europium in the trash can. In fact the two best places to mine rare-earths are China and waste electronics heaps. It would be much better if ESLs were designed for repair. Most of the parts in dad’s old TV were replaceable. When the picture tubed dimmed, you would take it to be rejuvenated.
A high voltage would shake the dust from the cathode and it was as good as Frankenstein’s monster after a lightning bolt. Years later when the tube failed again, you might have the electron gun rebuilt. As long as fluorescent tube-wielding teenagers like me didn’t go near it, TVs could be repaired indefinitely. In fact a few 1940s televisions continue to operate today.
ESLs are an amazing technology and I can hardly wait until they become widely available in Europe and the Middle East. I’d like to see them replace most kinds of compact fluorescent bulbs, but I hope the manufacturer rethinks the end-game.
They’re too amazing to end up in the trash can.
Photo credits: Admiral TV photo by puuikibeach via Flickr.
Compact Fluorescent spectrum photo by Brian Nitz
CRT image created by Søren Peo Pedersen via Wikipedia
Photo of child with old CRTs by Thousandways via Wikimedia CC-BY-SA-2.5
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
There are several errors in the article:
1. There is no mercury in a CRT TV tube.
2. The main emitter of X-rays in TVs was the high voltage rectifier tube, not the CRT. Only color CRTs emitted X-rays, and they were weak. Te fix for most TV sets was to replace the high voltage rectifier tube with one designed toi block X-rays with metal.
3. There is no europium in LCDs or LEDs. There is just a red filter on some pixels. Only CRTs and some fluorescent lights contain europium.
4. Not all krypton is radioactive. Only that produced by nuclear fission is radioactive. The starters contained radioactive krypton to make them more uniform. There is less radioactivity in the krypton than in the americium in smoke alarms. And most fluorescent starters used neon instead of krypton.
5. Europium is not the only red phosphor. The other red phosphors were just too orange to use for color TV. So the light bulb does not need europium.
6. There is not nearly destructiveness of the vacuum in the bulb as there is in a much larger TV tube. The amount of force depends on the size of the tube. So the ESL bulb should not have any more vacuum than a normal light bulb.
7. Phosphors can be externally stimulated, making the bulb last forever.
8. The ESL seems to have dropped out of availability. I have been trying to obtain one for three years.
Hello there, There’s no doubt that your site could possibly be having web browser compatibility problems. When I look at your site in Safari, it looks fine however, if opening in IE, it’s got some overlapping issues. I just wanted to give you a quick heads up! Other than that, great website!
crjc & Jap8283: Incandescents are actually from the 19th century. The carbon thread incandescent was patented by two Canadians in 1874. If you count the even less efficient shorter lived carbon-arc lights that pre-dated Edison’s success and utility infrastructure, they’re early 19th century inventions (1806). 138 years is a pretty good run for any technology. But the improvement in LEDs over the past decade beats the improvements in incandescents over those 138 years.
The light bulb and the automobile also faced quite a bit of resistance when they were introduced. People don’t like change and probably would have stayed with the oil lamp forever if they weren’t running out of oil. Edison’s bulbs came about because they were more convenient, safer and their 5% efficiency was better than what an oil lamp could deliver.
Tony P, the deposit & rebuild/refurb model makes a lot of sense. But if the company doesn’t do it, maybe you should. Somebody can make money on these things, especially with China’s export tariffs on rare-earths.
Oh crjc you completely missed the bus. The incandescent
light bulb is old outdated expensive technology from early
20th century. If you are a multi-millionaire there is no
problem, but for the other 90% of the world who live on a
budget the old habits must go. These new bulbs consume up to
80% less energy than the old bulbs. If you run 10 lights at
once at 100-watts each you can pay for 1000-watts versus
220-watts per kilowatt hr. If you can afford to pay hundreds
of dollars per month on your electric bill then Merry Christmas
to you but for the rest of us, a $25.00 monthly light bill
is the better choice.
I’ll stick with my incandescants, thanks. They aren’t banned here in Canada yet, and look like they may never be, since all the new bulb types are made elsewhere. The 95% heat output is quite welcome for 8 out of 12 months, and for the other 4 the sun shines for longer than I’ll be awake.
Well, you could build in a solid recycling program for the Europium. Make it so a small fee is applied, and recycling is EASY. Perhaps return it to place of purchase and get 10% off your next bulb or something to that effect. That way the Europium is in a closed cycle.
Granted, some people will just toss them into the trash. So that means trash sorting needs to be cognizant of these ESL bulbs, pull them out and sent them to centralized recycling facilities.
Rosie, nice description. I imagine they start up more like a candle or an old oil lamp. Cozy indeed!
They will not separate the electronics from the bulb because that way they can build a finite lifetime into the electronics and force us to buy a whole new bulb when the electronics burns out.
I have been buying LED bulbs. Despite the fact that the LED element will last essentially forever, I have found that the electronics do not, so the bulb essentially lasts no longer than an incandescent. What a waste. What a scam. I am sure it is deliberate.
Peggy, thanks for the information! I’m really looking forward to being able to personally review the EMEA version of these bulbs. The optical properties, color spectrum and versatility of Edison bulbs have been difficult to duplicate.
Yan, you have me on that one. Thanks for the correction! Now I must admit that I’m not old enough to have seen it.
The Cubs won the NL pennant in ’45, not the World Series.
I too have some of these ESL R30s Rosie. I describe the process of turning off to on as “blooming”. Great light!
I have some of these bulbs and the technology really is all it’s cracked up to be, in my opinion. I like the light color and unlike the LEDs I’m familiar with, these ESL light bulbs are surprisingly bright. It’s a soft brightness, though. (Does that make sense?)
There’s a characteristic about these bulbs that I really think is quite cool, but isn’t something being touted, and that’s the way these bulbs activate once you hit the light switch. The light doesn’t come on the same as an incandescent. The light appears to fill up the bulb then spills out into the room. It only takes about one and a half seconds, but it’s noticeable. Let me be clear, it’s not at all a delay like you see with a lot of CFLs. I comes on instantly, but there’s a milliseconds process to it. Anyone who gets one of these bulbs will see exactly what I’m talking about. Anyway, I think it’s very cool. And the event is completely soft and silent. Worth checking out.