Current location:
Collection Storage Facility
Provenance:
Ontario Hydro acquired this artifact for its Museum of Electrical Progress in the late 1960s, transferring it to the national collection in 1992.
Technical history:
Designed to dispense high-intensity lighting along major highways, the Powerlite lamp was an innovation of the 1960s. Nicknamed "The Cobra Head" because of its design, the lamp was equipped with a transformer and ballast to regulate the voltage and current. Although most have been phased out, some of these lamps continue to light up Canada’s highways today.
History:
More efficient than incandescent and fluorescent lamps, mercury lamps, also called mercury-vapour lamps, generated an electric arc in vaporized mercury to produce light. European scientists experimented with mercury-vapour light as early as 1835. The first commercial mercury lamps were manufactured in the United States in 1901 by Peter Cooper Hewitt. Mercury-vapour lamps were applied to street lighting in 1948, and since the 1970s, have been largely replaced by sodium lamps.
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