Edmund Germer was a German scientist who basically made lighting more efficient by inventing the florescent lamp. He was born in Berlin 1901 and graduated from the University of Berlin in the 1920’s with a doctorate in lighting technology. What he tried to do was to create a lighting device which was more efficient in creating light and outputted less heat then the standard incandescent light. The incandescent lap converted 6% of the energy going through it into light and the other 94% was in the form of heat. In 1926 he patented, with Friedrich Meyer and Hans J. Spanner, the florescent lamp, US patent #2182732. What he did was he coated a tube of an arc lamp with UV absorbing powder that fluoresced in the visible region of the spectrum. This created a color that was comparable to an incandescent lamp, a white color. He also invented the high pressure vapor lamp and a high pressure Hg vapor lamp that emitted less heat.
General electric bought his patent for the florescent lamp for $180,000 and they also bought the rights to his pressure Hg vapor lamp. Over his life he had 22 sole US patents and 30 sole German patents and over 100 co-patents. He co-founded the Rectron Company, worked for Osram and Phillips in the 1930’s as a freelance inventor and he received the Frank P. Brown Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1954 his new lamp.
His Picture:
http://www.invent.org/images/images_hof/search/inventors/Germer_Edmund.gif
Picture of his invention:
http://z.about.com/d/inventors/1/0/w/Q/germer_patent.jpg
Resources:
http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/65.html
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_fluorescent.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0767141.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Germer
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