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
Popularity: 2% [?]
April 5th, 2011 at 11:14 pm
[...] I will regret posting this, but pickles also are suitable short-term illumination sources. See http://openmaterials.org/2010/02/01/…ce-in-pickles/ Not sure if they will work this way after cleaning a chain first [...]