openMaterials

I just found an interesting ‘Technical Note’ authored by Western Research Laboratory (WRL), a research group that was founded by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1982.

‘Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems’, inspired by the work of Bill Bidermann, investigates claims that by inserting electrodes into a dill pickle, and energizing with modest alternating currents, caused the pickle to glow.

The paper provides a nice introduction and theory of organic incandescent illumination devices and details their experimental methods and analysis.

Technical note abstract:

Recent anecdotal reports of novel principles of illumination have stressed qualitative aspects. This note presents a quantitative study of an organic illumintation system, characterizing the temperature and current-flow properties of the system as functions of time and device parameters. Theoretical and practical implications of these measurements are discussed.

*update* - here’s a video from MIT TechTV

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