March 13, 2015 • 46 mins
Artificial light is one of the most fundamental of all human technologies. What will the future of light look like?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, I get
shattered like a lightbulb in an October moon. And I'm
Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. So today we decided
(00:25):
we would talk about something that's very important to us
and really to most people on Earth. Yeah, and that's light. Yeah,
we actually had a brilliant idea. Oh, light bulb went
off overhead, and we decided, let's talk about the future
of light and light bulbs. Kind of a focus on
light bulbs, but well, we have to get to light bulbs.
(00:46):
But well we can talk about the future. Really, what
we mean is focusing on artificial light. Yeah, not just
light that we can get by waiting around till the
sun comes up, right, because artificial light is far more
important and revolutionary to our lives then we often give
it credit for. I mean, think about all of the
(01:07):
ways your life would be different if we didn't have
artificial light. You could only see what was going on
in the daytime. I would have to make wake up
much earlier in the morning. Yeah, I would. I would
have stubbed all of my toes off by now, as
I just wandered blindly through my house. Yeah, I do
(01:27):
that with lights, so I just wouldn't have toes anymore. Well,
I'm of the opinion that the story of artificial light
is actually one of the most interesting questions we have
in how humans have co evolved with our technology. Just
think about the way artificial lighting has changed the way
humans live and sleep. I mean, number one, it allows
(01:50):
us to live in places that don't have a lot
of natural lights, so we can adapt to a much
more indoor lifestyle. Another thing is that, I know some
scientists think that humans used to have different sleep patterns
and we largely have now that back back in the
days before artificial lighting, bi phasic sleep was very common,
(02:12):
where you would sleep twice a day in shorter little
blocks instead of one long sleep at night. Yeah, and
you would actually spend that time between the sleeps doing
you know, various things you might be doing, you know,
actual social visits for example. Right. But as artificial lighting
indoor lighting became much more common and cheaper and more widespread,
(02:33):
that just kind of faded away, and now in most
of the world, it's very common to sleep in just
one big chunk. Or think about all the ways that
artificial lighting has made learning easier. Imagine if you weren't
able to read except like outside in the daytime. Or
think about all of the other human inventions that would
(02:55):
be absolutely useless without artificial light. I mean not not
even including all the ones that use light obviously, like
we couldn't have our computer screen things like that, yeah,
if they didn't emit light for us to see. But
we couldn't have a submarine without artificial light. It's it's
absolutely fundamental, it's crucial, it's a it's a bedrock of
(03:19):
all the other technology that we use in our lives.
I would not be excited about driving a car past dusk, right,
Oh exactly, Yeah, he didn't have headlights. Yeah, it's it's
almost ridiculous to try to imagine the world we live
in without it, and yet it gets no credit. We
we don't really think to be thankful for artificial light
very often. It was a big climb to get to
(03:41):
having artificial light that's as good and as cheap and
as plentiful as it is today. And it makes me
wonder what the future is for being able to see
things artificial light. Yeah, so today we wanted to kind
of dive into the history of how people have create
at light and then talk about some of the ways
(04:02):
that it's that it is going in the future and
technologies that are up and coming that we're excited about. Yea. Yeah,
So we obviously had some source of artificial light, even
if it was pretty crude and not awesome, but we
had some source as soon as we had fire, Bernie,
as you may you may refer to. So, yeah, it
(04:23):
probably wasn't that long after humans discovered fire that they
started to figure out ways of transporting that fire and
keeping that fire burning so that they could use as
a light source. Um. And thus we get to one
of the earliest forms, the oil lamp. So tell me
about oil lamps, Jonathan. All Right, So let's say that
(04:44):
you first you gotta find some form of vessel doesn't
have to be artificial. You could actually find like maybe
a shell or a rock that has a kind of
a hollow a concave area in it, and then you
put some form of flammable material, let's say moss in it,
and you then you soak that moss actually in animal fat,
(05:08):
which would be the oil in this case, and you
light the fire. The oil and moss together work is
fuel so that the fire remains lit. You can actually
move the rock around so that you can carry the
fire with you. And this is the example of an
oil lamp. Uh. These date back thousands of years before
written history. We have found examples of oil lamps. So
(05:32):
so to like, if you're just not done with your
cave painting and you really want to get it done tonight,
you can. Or or if you've gone on one of
those amazing cave painting wine tours with your fellow cave
painters and you're going cave to cave and it's getting laid,
you know, you've got to still be able to see
before you. You know, you don't want to skip the
last cave that was the best one. I think, to
(05:54):
be fair, wine was a little bit after these oil lams.
I'm w h any The pains were notorious complainers. Another
thing I'm not so sure about that. We could look
it up, but I think humans have had alcohol for
a long long time. But you know, you bring up
cave paintings, that's another thing. You know, if you don't
(06:16):
have some source of light that you can carry around
with you. How do you think these deep internal cave
paintings were done when people have to be able to
see their work. Yeah, exactly. So you know what's interesting
to me is that the oil lamp stuck around from
prehistory for a really long time. We're talking about seeing
(06:37):
improvements to the oil lamp made in the eighteen century,
so so thousands of years here, and that's when I'm
the are Gone invented a lamp that was more efficient
and then it consume more of the wick and the oil,
which meant that you didn't have to trim the wick
away like the burning wick. Once it was essentially turned
(06:57):
into carbon, you need to remove it. Um So this
would be the way of where it was more of
it was being consumed, so you wouldn't have to trim
as frequently. Uh So that was a big improvement. But
oil lamps were eventually replaced it by kerosene lamps in
the eighteen fifties. Uh nine thousand years ago is when
we started having wine maybe right, Okay, I was about
(07:19):
to say, like, when did we start having wine in
the office. It's kind of awesome. Uh So, but we
as humans, I got it. But oil lamps were replaced
by kerosene lamps eighteen fifties, which uses obviously kerosene as
a fuel and a wick or mantle as the means
of having the flame. Uh, then we also have gas lamps.
(07:39):
Now this is kind of interesting. So oil lamps and
kerosene lamps neither of those were necessarily good for lighting
something like a street. These were usually small lamps that
were good to carry around. Like if you ever see
depictions of a character carrying a small flame lantern around,
that's probably either an oil lamp or a kerosene lamp.
(07:59):
But gas lamps used coal gas as fuel, and the
earliest example I could find dates from sevent two, so
actually pre dates kerosene lamps. That was when William Murdoch
used coal gas to light his home as an experiment.
I guess if you are convinced that your idea is
gonna work, outfitting your own home with something that could
(08:22):
potentially kill you is the way to go. So did
William Murdoch live long enough to be recognized for his achievement?
He did. He actually eventually outfitted his workplace, which was
the Soho Foundry, with gas lamps and by the early
eighteen hundreds, gas lamps would start to become installed in
several cities in Europe. Baltimore became the first city in
the United States to have gas lamps, and there are
(08:42):
other areas other cities in the US that still have
some gas lamp districts where either the gas lamps were
rebuilt or preserved um like San Diego as an amazing
gas lamp district. Uh and gas lamps remained the main
method of lighting streets and homes until the twentieth century,
so it stuck around for a good while. But somewhere
(09:03):
in the meanwhile, all this time, we've been talking about
burning stuff to create light. What what about this new
fangled electricity idea that was starting to hit the scene. Yeah,
there were a lot of people experimenting with it as
soon as you got volta with a voltaic pile. Once.
Once that discovery was made, everyone was wondering if there
(09:23):
could be really cool uses for this discovery. One of
those people was a British inventor, Humphrey Davy, who in
eighteen o two connected pair of voltaic piles to pair
of the charcoal electrodes and an arc of light emitted
between the two carbon rods. Now, it was not a
practical source of artificial light because one, it was way
(09:44):
too bright. You could not use it to light a home.
It would just be too uncomfortable. The light would be
too intense. The second problem was it consumed those carbon
rods very quickly, so before long you would not be
able to generate light at all. So first it would
be too much light, and then it'll be no light.
So it's kind of like trying to light your home
with a sparkler. Yeah, not not a great not a
(10:07):
great experience at least not if you're over the age
of like ten. So uh. Eventually, Williams State would make
improvements to arc lamps in eighty eight, creating a clockwork
mechanism that governed the movement of those carbon rods to
maximize that fuel to consume as much of them as
possible before the connection was lost. So, in other words,
(10:28):
it would move the rods in relation to one another
to try and keep the art going as long as
it possibly could, and picturing something like a like a
clockwork spit roast. For I'm not sure if that's what
it looked like. I have not seen a picture, so
I'm going to say you were accurate, and I could
be uncertain of that. Uh So the problem was that
(10:51):
State's invention was costly, so it didn't really take off either.
But the the promise of using electricity as a source
of light in some way remained. Well, when did we
get the incandescent bulbs that we're also familiar with? That's
a why did you ask me that question? That's a
full episode right there, Joe. So incandescent bulbs. The the
(11:15):
journey to the incandescent bulb was a very long one,
starting all the way back with Humphrey Davy. But you
have this progression of various inventors who all worked with
electricity to try and figure out how to make something incandesce,
which is all about heat. You heat up a material
to a temperature high enough to make it glow. That
(11:39):
is incandescence. That's what we mean when we say an
incandescent bulb. We're talking about heating up a filament, some
form of material to a temperature high enough where it
will glow. It will get hot enough to glow at
a incredible luminescence so that you can actually see by it.
So we're talking super hot here, warm Yeah, if you've
(12:01):
ever touched a light bulb after it had just been
turned off, you know what I'm talking about. They can
get super hot, um, and we're the ones we're using
today are not as hot as some of the earlier
ones any rate. Uh. The filament is consumed in this process.
Right as you heat it up, it actually begins to
essentially burn away. So that means eventually you get to
(12:23):
a point where the filament is going to break somewhere
along this connection because it's disintegrated enough. Yeah. Yeah, it's
essentially there's they're little breaks that that open up until
there's no longer a connection, Like it just breaks in half,
or maybe not in half, but somewhere along its length,
and you have electrodes on either side. Well, now you
no longer have a pathway for electricity to flow through.
(12:44):
So that's when the light burns out. That's when you
get the the dead bulb. If you ever have picked
up an incandescent ballb after it's burned out and give
it a little shake and you hear that little tingle tinging,
that's the that's the broken filament inside just dancing around
because it's not connected to anything anymore. Uh, so early
incandescent bulbs were problematic because the filaments burned out at
(13:05):
a very short time, and it took some time for
people to figure out how to fix this. One of
the big developments was, hey, we need to remove the
filament from oxygen so that it doesn't burn. So that
means we have to put it in some form of
container and create a vacuum. So early lightbulbs were put
in vacuum tubes, but vacuum tube technology was not very
(13:26):
good in the early nineteenth century. It would not be
until Thomas Edison came around. Thomas Haysen did not invent
the lightbulb. No, he is often credited as the inventor
of the light bulb. He did not. He invented essentially
the first commercially viable lightbulb, the first one to remain
working long enough for it to be an actual, you
(13:48):
useful thing, right. Um So, he started experimenting with a
couple of different types of filaments and eventually discovered that
a carbon coated filament and an oxygen free glass bulb
could last several hours like forty forty hours of light
before burning out. Uh So, Edison was not the first
one to make the use of the container free of oxygen.
(14:10):
Like I said, the other people had other people had
tried to make vacuum tubes, but Edison's approach was sort
of the perfection of that art. Uh. The application of
tungsten um was another big development in this light bulb process,
tungsten being a metal that has a melting point of
up to above six thousand degrees fahrenheit, which is something
(14:30):
around a thirty degrees celsius. And that's high. That's high,
y'all um. Lots of metals give off mostly heat a
k A. Infrared photons um when they're electrified, but infrared
light is invisible and therefore does not help us for
light bulb purposes. Also, if you get most metals too hot,
(14:53):
they'll just melt, which is not useful for light bulbs either.
So uh, you can heat tongue though to a comfortable
like like four thousand degrees fahrenheit or celsius, and it'll
stay solid and emit lots of visible light. So when
I was saying these things get hot, I was not
kidding quite warm. Yeah, But the thing is that a
(15:16):
plain old vacuum tube is not the best thing for
tungsten because when when it heats up like that, it'll
start shedding atoms that will eventually collect on the inside
of the bulb, which will darken it over time, which
again is not conducive to things what you want to
make light for you. But different gases um in in
in that vacuum tube, say inert gases, because you don't
(15:40):
want gasses floating around. And there, yeah, have been different
gases that are in nert have been experimented with nice
and one of the things I want to mention also
were helogen light bulbs. Do you guys have a lot
of experience with halogen light bulbs, so I'm aware of
them my house and my house has is crazy. My
(16:00):
house was made with all these different types of light fixtures,
no two of which appear to accept the same kind
of light bulb. So you can imagine how I feel
whenever a light bulb burns out, like I have to
go through the closet of light bulbs to find the
right one. Some of them are halogen light bulbs, so
they also work through incandescence. They use a tungsten filament
(16:22):
like Lauren was mentioning, so similar but inside a quartz envelope.
That's filled with halogen gas. Now, the halogen gas combines
with the tungsten vapor that's given off while the tungsten
is incandessing. So while normally the filament would be kind
of vaporizing away over time until it breaks and then
your light bulb burns out, in a halogen bulb, it
(16:43):
that that vapor combines with the halogen gas, and the
halogen gas will redeposit tungsten on the filament, So it
preserves the life of the filament. It extends it. It's
not extended indefinitely. It will still burn out, but it
does mean that the hall light bulb will remain viable
longer because of this redepositing. That's so metal. It is
(17:06):
so metal, so that those are the incandescent bulbs. Well,
incandescent bulbs are a thing of the past, right, I
mean that's that's they're more and more places on Earth
where you are not even allowed to buy them anymore
for energy efficiency purposes. That's great, though just esthetically it
is a little sad. I like the globe and incandescent bulb, Yeah,
they are. They do have a very kind of warm
(17:27):
glow to the understandably exactly so that they don't live
as long, and they don't they're not great at energy efficiency. Alright, no,
they're not more what's better. Well, next, we've got the
fluorescent bulbs, which have their own issues, but fluoresce and
bulbs work in a different way. So fluoresce and bulb
contains a pair of electrodes. So that's similar to an
(17:50):
incandescent bulb, but instead of you don't have a filament
in this case, right, you just have you have a
gas filament. I guess it's not a physical it's not
like an actual solid filament. I should say is physical?
Is just gas. So these pair of electrodes. You also
have some mercury. Uh not freddie mercury, which would be facoless. Yeah,
don't don't stuff him into vacuum tubes. That's not no, no, uh,
(18:15):
he's your best friend. So you've got the bit of mercury.
You've got an inert gas usually are gone, and a
phosphor powder coating on the inside of the glass. So
when you turn on a fluorescent lamp, current flows to
the electrodes. All right. That creates a difference of voltage
across the two electrodes, and the electron movement excites the mercury.
Some of that mercury changes from liquid, which is what
(18:37):
mercury tends to be in room temperature, to a gas.
So you get collisions between the electrons coming through the
electrodes uh and the charged particles with the mercury gas atoms.
That bumps up the electrons to a higher energy level,
which is how any kind of photon is created. Exactly.
It's when when an electron returns to its normal energy
(18:58):
state and being yeah, it has to give off that
excess energy. Right, So if I if I excite an electron,
if I energize an electron, so it bumps up to
a higher energy level and then I stop, Well, then
the electron is going to return to its normal state
parties over. Yeah, but then it's like, well, I can't
carry all this extra energy with me. I gotta get
(19:19):
rid of it, so it emits it in the form
of a photon, which is the basic particle of light. However,
in this case, we're talking about photons and the ultra
violet range, which means that you and I can't see them,
and that is where that phosphor cutting comes in. Yeah,
because in this case, the phosphor coating. What it can
do is absorbed that ultra violet radiation. It has the
(19:39):
same sort of uh process where the electrons in the
fosphor coading get excited. They're like, oh, ultra violet awesome,
they jump up and then return to normal, but they
emit light within the visible spectrum. So it's it's kind
of like it's like a step by step process of
trying to get light from the visible light from this
(20:01):
from this approach. And that's exactly how these things work.
So it's pretty cool. Um, literally, much cooler. Yeah, it
doesn't involve in condessing. Of course, now we live in
the age of the L E ED bol yes, and
this is kind of a game changer in a way. Yeah, so,
I mean L E d s also still have a
(20:21):
lot of challenges, but I'll cover that in a second.
Light emitting diodes also, that's what LED stands for, and
they are taught type of solid state lighting or s
s L. So solid state sounds pretty cool. You're like,
all right, so how does this thing work? Well, we
have to talk about semi conductors again. I know, I'm sorry. No,
(20:42):
we love talking about semi conductors. I love talking about them.
I wish I had a truly deep understanding of them.
I have a basic level understanding of semi conductor technology,
maybe a little beyond basic, But I always every time
I go into this, I'm always like, am I explaining
this correctly? So with semiconductors you have You're doing great,
thank you. You have positively charged sections, negatively charged sections.
(21:06):
So the negatively charged area of the semiconductor has an
excess of electrons. That's what creates the negative charge. Right,
the positively charged section we call uh we say that
it has holes. In other words, it has the capacity
to accept electrons. Okay, so it has the ability to
create a flow from one side to the other. Yeah. You.
It essentially says, hey, you know, if you got electron
(21:28):
sent them on over because I got some space, dude,
I mean like we can totally crash over here. I
need a roomy rent is high. You know. It's kind
of like living in San Francisco. So in this case,
you also have an area in between the two where
you it's a mixture kind of. You have the holes
and you have electrons. The electrons fill the first adjacent
(21:48):
line of holes, and unless you give more energy to
the negative side. UH, it reaches a level of equilibrium
where there's kind of a barrier between the the pete
hype that's the positive side, and the N type that's
the negative side UH material in the semiconductor, and that
area in between is called the depletion zone, which I
(22:11):
like to think is where you send Superman villains if
the negative zone fills up. UM. So when you introduce
electricity to the semiconductor on the inside of the material,
the electrons are pushed from the negative side to the
positive side. They can overcome the depletion zone. Now when
they get to the positive side, they enter the holes.
(22:32):
The holes are at a lower energy level than the
electrons the excited electrons are, so the electrons move into
the holes, they emit that excess of energy in the
form of a photon, just as we were talking about
with the fluorescent bulbs, and thus you get light. And
this flow, by the way, only works in one direction. Diodes,
that's a very important electronic component, and that's the that's
(22:55):
one of the cool things about them. They allow electricity
to flow in one direction, but not the their way,
and it has to go from ND type to P
type because it's you know, you can't you can't make uh,
negatively charged particles go into a negatively charged area because
the light charges are going to not not without a
lot of effort. You've gotta push really hard. So, now
(23:18):
that we've sort of looked at where we've gotten to,
what we've sort of caught up with what modern technology
has to offer in lighting, what does the future hold?
I mean, one of the things we can look at
is just the the efficiency of electrical light bulbs. They've
come a long way, right sure, Yeah, Like like why
we're addressing this question at all? You know, like we
(23:38):
have a lot of things that work right now, but
how well do they work? Right? While wiring incandescent bulbs
considered to be awful, when why are these other ones
considered to be great. Here's one experiment you can try. Actually,
don't try this because you might burn yourself. Okay, go
up to an old incandescent bulb while it's on and
(23:59):
touch it. Don't do this. It can get really telling
me to do something and then not to do it. No,
don't do this because you can burn your hand. It
can get really hot. What what is heat? Heat is waste?
He does is wasted energy. Right, it means that you
are you are pouring all this electricity and to generate
the heat, which in turn generates the light. But that's
(24:21):
that means that if there are alternatives where you don't
have to heat up a material to this incredible temperature
in order to get the light, then maybe you could
be more efficient. You're you're you're wasting photons in that
infrared zone, which unless you're Georgy LaForge you cannot see. Yeah.
So ideally what you would want is is some kind
of thank you, thank you, Jonathan, You're welcome. Ideally you'd
(24:42):
want a device where all of the energy going into
it gets converted directly to visible photo. Right, that would
be wonderful. I mean, it's never gonna happen, but it
would be the goal. Right. But the closer the closer
you can get to that, the higher the efficiency of
your bul your light producing uh artifacts. So let's let's
do a quick comparison of the three major types that
(25:04):
we mentioned, incandescent, fluorescent and L E D s. All right,
so incandescent modern sixty what Incandescent light bulbs have a
life expectancy of around twelve hundred hours of use so
well beyond the forty hours the of Edison's first light
bulbs us and by the way, managed to get those
light bulbs up to a much higher hours of lifetime
(25:25):
than forty so they used three thousand kilowatt hours of
electricity over the span of fifty thousand hours of use.
Now you might be saying, wait, a sixty one incandescent
light bulb has twelve hundred hours of lifetime, how could
you get fifty thous hours of use out of it? Well,
you couldn't get fifty thousand hours of use out of one.
You would have You would have to have enough of
(25:46):
these light bulbs to get the equivalent of fifty thousand
hours of use, in this case forty two light bulbs
to get fifty thousand hours of use over that fifty
thousand hours, you would be using three thousand kilowatt hours
of electricity. All right, so we get that all the way. Also,
side note, they're pretty easy to manufacture, Yes, yes, which
is positive for UM. It is important because that factors
(26:06):
into how expensive they're going to be when you are
going to buy them. So while they might not be
terribly efficient, they're also not hard to make, so they're
not expensive. Then you've got fluorescent bulbs, which last for
approximately ten thousand hours, so nearly ten times as long
as the incandescent bulbs. They require fourteen watts to reach
(26:30):
the light equivalent of a sixty watt incandescent bulb, so
they need less of a wattage to reach that same luminescence.
They use seven kilowatt hours over fifty thousand hours of use,
and you would just need five of them to reach
that fifty thousand hours. But they're a little harder to
make a little bit, and they also contain mercury, so
(26:52):
that's another thing that you should remember that if you're
ever disposing of fluorescent bulbs, you've got to be careful
with them because mercury is poisonous. Don't break it up
and lick it. No, well, I don't. I don't know
what would possess you to do that, but definitely don't
do it. Finally, we've got the LED bulbs. They can
last fifty hours on a single bulb, so they can
hit that fifty tho all in just one bulb. Attend
(27:15):
what led bulb can give the equivalent light of a
sixty what incandescent bulb it uses five l what hours
of electricity over the course of fifty hours of use.
But here's the thing about l e ED bulbs, they're
pretty much a pain in the butt to manufacture. Yeah, So,
if you've ever shopped for light bulbs and you've looked
for LED bulbs, thinking I want to be as as
(27:38):
efficient with my energy use as possible, you're gonna see
that the price tag for those LED bulbs is significantly
higher than for your alternatives. And if you did the
math over the lifetime of the light bulbs and the
amount of energy you would use, you would probably see
that the l e ED is going to save you
the money in the long run, but it has a
higher upfront cost. So it all depends on your situation. Right,
(28:01):
If you can afford the upfront cost, then it makes
perfect sense to go and outfit your home with l
a ED lights. Again, like, my house has got all
these different weird light fixtures, some of which do not
have LED alternatives for them. Like, there's not an LED
light that's made in that size yet, or at least
not one that I have been able to find. Uh
So it's an exercise and frustration for me. But even
(28:25):
if they did have all the LED fixtures. I'm not
sure that I would be able to do it because
that would be really expensive to buy lights for every
single fixture in my house. Like that's a big upfront cost.
It is now again, over the lifetime, i'd be saving money.
But if I don't have the cash to pay for
it up front, that it doesn't help run. You know,
(28:45):
one of the areas in which we've talked about using
L e d s for future applications is in vertical farming,
because you know, one of the problems with vertical farming.
We've talked about vertical farming on the show before. The
ideas that you you know, sort of stack up a
greenhouse model within your cities, and this solves a lot
(29:06):
of problems. The crops are less exposed to the you know,
the weather, and so they're they're less vulnerable to changes
in climate and whether they're also closer to their final destination.
Because a lot of the food we consume is in cities,
but you can't grow it in the cities normally, so
it has large transportation costs, their spoilage. Having stuff in
(29:26):
cities is good, but at the same time, it's hard
to get all the light. You need to get even
light distribution for your crops when you've got them stacked
up in in the skyscraper and everything. Everything on the
outside edge is going to have, you know, or at
least everything on the eastern and western sides of the
outside edge, you're going to have plenty of sun exposure.
But some of the other areas, particularly the ones further inside,
(29:48):
are not right. So what a lot of people who
have researched vertical farming have said is that, well, you're
really just going to have to supplement it with artificial lighting. Now,
you you can use artificial lighting to help plants grow
and grow healthy. You can use led bulbs like we've
been talking about. But part of the problem there is,
once you're investing that much money and energy into growing
(30:11):
them in the city with all these light bulbs, is
there really actually an advantage. Yeah, you might be negating
that that cost savings and effort savings exactly right. But
one of the interesting solutions I've seen to this is
the idea of using only pink led light. The idea
behind this is that plants need light to grow and survive. Sure,
(30:34):
they size it right, but they might not need the
entire visible spectrum, so some plants can survive on only
some narrower frequency bands of light. And actually, so there
are these things called pink pink houses, which are growing
facilities that only use certain frequencies of light and use
(30:56):
less energy by doing that and not producing white light,
which is requires all the frequencies of light. Oh yeah, yeah, no,
it makes it makes sense when you think about it
in terms of color theories. And plants are green, they're
they're reflecting a lot of those green spectrum photons and
our wavelengths. I'm sorry, well, either way, I'm still likely correct.
(31:18):
Light behaves is both a wave at a particle, right,
so certainly right right, So so yeah, if you just
shoot the kind of light that they're going to absorb
anyway at them, then you're yeah, anyway, I thought that
was interesting, Yeah, very interesting. Another question is simply how
efficient can we make our LED lights for these kind
of things. LED lights are already very efficient. I mean
(31:41):
we've done a really really good job getting them pretty
during efficient as far as energy consumption goes. Yes, oh
sure sure. And it's definitely a possibility that the expensive
processes and technologies that go into making l ed bulbs
will be streamlined in the future. Those kind of technologies
improve all the time. Oh yeah, that's a good win.
So even if the bulbs themselves can't get much more efficient,
(32:03):
maybe the process of making them can. Yeah, now, and
that's that's definitely something that I think will improve. Um,
maybe it will improve gradually over time. It's kind of
to me it's the same as micro chips. They are
one of those one of those things where we do
get improvements in the processes, but it tends to be
this kind of tick talk approach. That's what Intel calls it.
(32:25):
They'll they'll create the technology to make microprocessors with ever
ever smaller transistors or discrete elements on it, and then
the talk part is where they maximize that technology and
really are able to take advantage of it to the
greatest extent they can before the next tick where they
(32:46):
make it even smaller. So the talk tends to be
a little bit uh more cost effective because they've already
made the investment into increasing the technology so they can
make these uh increasingly small elements on a on a
silicon chip. So we might see something like that for
light emitting diodes, but there are other other alternatives, folks,
(33:07):
you mean, apart from L E d s, there are
tell me about the bulb of the future light which
might not be bulb shaped. Now it might it actually
may not even need to have a and may not
need to be encapsulated in anything. Light emitting electrochemical cells,
so that sounds really complicated. They're sometimes called l E
c s or sometimes l E e c s because
(33:29):
it's light emitting at least. Uh So, well, I guess
it all depends on whether you think it's a hard
see or self see. So it sounds like it's a mouthful.
But the light emitting electrochemical cells, but first, you know,
electrochemical cells are something that we're all familiar with already.
Batteries are an example of an electrochemical cell. So electrochemical
(33:52):
cells are just they they allow either the transmission of
generation of of electricity through some form of chemical reaction. Now,
in the case of light emitting electro chemical cells, well
the whole things in the name, right, it emits light
when you have electricity introduced into this, So it's a
solid state device kind of like LEDs. But let's talk
(34:15):
about it in the form of a sandwich, right, it
would it would be a polymer sandwich because you talk
about whatever's in the middle is the sandwich part, right
like you wouldn't you would say, like a you know,
a roast beef sandwich, lowrist beefs in the middle, it's
not the bread parts. So in this case, be a
polymer sandwich. So the middle of the sandwich is the
(34:36):
light emitting polymer which is filled with mobile ions. Uh.
The bottom of the sandwich, the base of the bulb,
in other words, could be if you wanted it to be.
It could be an opaque electrode wouldn't have to be
the top layer would have to be transparent in order
to let light pass through. Otherwise you would have these
opaque coverings and light would be generated in between them,
(34:58):
but you wouldn't be able to see it, right, Yeah,
that wouldn't be useful. It's a light bulb, it would be. Yeah.
I'd be like if you've got a light bulb dipped
it in paint and then the paint was so thick
that it would not allow light to pass through, it's
not useful. So uh, a lot of them will use uh,
you know, various types of very thin, thin layers to
act as these electrodes that are effectively transparent. Uh So,
(35:23):
like indium tin oxide was used in a lot of
the early ones. I'm seeing now that graphing is starting
to be used in in prototype. Yeah. So graphing, by
the way, in case you forgot, that's the sheet of
carbon atoms that's one atom thick. If you were to
roll graphing into a tube, you would have a carbon nanotube. Um. So,
(35:43):
graphing is being used as the electrode of choice by
a lot of different researchers. And one of the biggest
advantages of l c s over l e d s
is that they are potentially way easier to mass produce.
So we had talked about how l e d s
have this product shin challenge that it's it's a very intensive,
energy inefficient means of making the light bulbs. Light bulbs
(36:07):
themselves are efficient, but the manufacturing process isn't as because
it's it's complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on.
L e c s are potentially way less complicated. You
could print them because you don't have to worry about
precision as much. Printing is not a very precise way
of going about making something because the layers of think
(36:27):
of it as ink can vary greatly across an entire sheet. However,
with l e c s that thickness is not critical
to the operation of the l e C So you
could do it using this kind of method of production
and not worry about impacting the effectiveness of the ultimate
bulb that you create. Yeah, so you can make a
(36:50):
lot of it. Potentially, you can make a lot of
it much more quickly than you could with L e
d s, thus bringing the cost way down for the consumer. Uh.
Now there are some challenges. One of the big ones
is getting l e c s to have their lifetime
up to comparable levels with the other technologies. So, according
to a report in the journal Chemical Science, researchers at
(37:13):
the universities of is It boss L, Basil, b A
S E L. This is where I have no idea
and valencia that one I know how to say. Uh,
they have created l e cs with an effective life
of So that's better than incandescent bulbs already. It's almost
more than twice the lifetime of your average incandescent bulb
(37:35):
at sixty watts anyway, but still well below l E
d s, which are at fifty hours, So it's not
it's it's promising. It's not uh at the level right
now where you would necessarily switch from one to the other,
even if it were ready for for the construction, which
(37:56):
isn't necessarily um. Also, they might never be as quick
acting as L E D s. One benefit of LEDs
is that you turn it on, You flip the switch,
and the bulb turns on pretty much instantaneously, um, which
is also a good point on incandescent bulbs. But depending
on what substance um you're using, as in a mirror
(38:17):
for the L E C, it can take a while
for for the photons to start photoning right, so kind
of like a fluorescent bulb, like an old school fluorescent bulb.
These days they've got these uh these like proactive switches
in them, but carrying a little bit of a charge
to begin with, so that they can they can have
like a dim section, a dim session and completely right way. Yeah,
(38:41):
because I remember those old bulbs where you would turn
it on and you would get the little flickering ink well,
which also can happen as the bulb gets older and
the electrodes start to have That's also where you used
to get the annoying, buzzing noise that fluorescent bulbs used
to make. You don't get it so much anymore because
they have these little starters, as Ned Flanders would say,
they hum like angels. It's odd, though, right, because we
(39:02):
all still have the association of those things when we
think Floresce embulbs. Those are the sort of things we
think about, or at least those are the sort of
things I think about when I think Florence embulbs, even
if it may not no longer be true anymore. Sure sure, um,
So we might never get an L E C TV
is the thing, like, it's probably never going to be
the best technology for things that need to refresh at
a at a constant rate, like like a high graphic display. Um.
(39:26):
But there's some really cool potentials with these things. Um.
For for instance, you can create lots of different colors
of light depending on what substance you're using as an emitter.
UM researchers are actually still kind of working on making
good clean white light from L A C s. It's
the one of the current challenges and getting the product
up to market. If you want a lavender bulbo, they
got the technology for you. But if you want just
(39:48):
a regular white bulb. We're still working so you can
sell it to music venues before you can sell it
to or or high school students from like three light
Oh my goodness, yes, put a unicorn on that baby. Um. Yeah,
and and also um, although l e c's have been
(40:10):
most commonly created on on glass, you can also totally
use a flexible and even stretchable substrates as as your base. Yeah.
This could mean that we have some truly inventive uh
light sources in our future, like things that you know
that we don't even associate with a thing that makes
(40:32):
light now, which is really cool, Like the idea that
with some creative application of this technology, we could have
totally new form factors for light sources, which maybe we'll
end up at tron a boy can dream. So we
had one last bit and Joe, I think you added
(40:52):
this in our notes. Well, I was just recalling how
maybe the future of light is that we don't need light?
Know why? Well, I do you remember back when we
talked about what humans would look like in the future, like,
you know, if humans continue evolving, how will we change?
And there was this one article in Forbes. I think
(41:14):
I recall where there are a couple of people were
speculating they were drawing pictures of these humans with huge
eyes and stuff, and they're like, this is what humans
will look like in the future, or at least that's
how it was interpreted. I think they defended themselves by
saying like, no, no, no, no no, we're just kind of guessing,
and well, they essentially what they said was, we said,
(41:35):
if you take this assumption that humans are going to
be genetically modifying themselves so that they alter their appearance
in some way, and if you take the assumption and
extend it down this particular path, here's what they might
look like. So, in other words, they were saying, we
never said this is what humans are gonna look like.
We said this is what humans could look like, which
(41:58):
I think at that point you wonder why would bother
or even making a picture. Well for the sake of conversation, yea, yeah,
it's interesting, and their argument being that it would be
evolutionarily advantageous for us to be able to see in
the dark when we are colonizing new dark planets. Yeah,
I think they said that it would be actually, uh,
(42:18):
we would re engineer ourselves to have gigantic eyes that
could take in huge amounts of you know, that basically
could see in the dark very well, because that would
be more energy efficient, you know, we wouldn't have to
waste so much energy official lighting if we could just
see in the dark. I mean, aside from the concerns
(42:39):
about how feasible that kind of genetic engineering is, I
don't know. I mean, I it seems kind of far
fetched to me, but I guess I can't dismiss it
out of hand. Maybe someday we would change ourselves. Another
way we could think about it is, let's imagine that
we become much more comfortable with wearing some kind of
(43:00):
goggles all the time, you know, like the next stage
beyond hollow lens and Google glass, we have some kind
of augmented reality tech goggles that we use. Would it
just be that we decide, hey, it's actually much more
efficient instead of lighting all our environments to just have
our glasses all have night vision. Uh. Again, seems kind
(43:21):
of far fetched, but maybe maybe, I guess. I guess
it would depend on on again, how the manufacture of
those technologies moved along. Right now, it's still relatively expensive
to create reliable night visions, so but yeah, if it's
you have to reach that tipping point right where the
(43:41):
alternative is more energy efficient and more economical than the
artificial light. And until we reach that point, the artificial
light is clearly going to be more more abundant. I
just imagine that if we do come to that stage
where we're all just looking through night vision goggles in
(44:02):
dark houses all the time, what's that going to be
like for our pets. I'm just thinking. I think I'm
just thinking of coming home one day and saying, honey,
I looked at I looked at the store lightbulb. Bulbs
are twenty dollars a piece. I'm getting my eyes and
big and they'll be back in. Yes, I think I
think cats pry my eyelids. I think cats would throw
(44:26):
us a party if we stopped putting bright lights on
all the time. I don't know, they might actually get
upset of the fact that we can actually see what
they're up to. Cats cats are very particular about that
kind of thing. Uh, well, this was kind of fun
to talk about the idea of let's just look at
something that a lot of us take for granted that
is a basic element in our lives, something that we
(44:48):
that's all around us all the time, and we don't
necessarily think about that frequently. Despite the fact that we
do associate having an idea with a lightbulb going on,
we don't necessarily actually think about the light bulbs themselves
so much. So this was a lot of fun. Oh
and one last thing before before we go into our
outroar here, I wanted to come back with I had
actually written a thing about how old wine was for
(45:10):
what the stuff, So I'm not sure why I was
totally blanking on it earlier. But wine has been around,
we suspect for about nine thousand years. Cave paintings date
back as long as forty years, so there's a good
amount of time during which people were probably not drunk
unless they found a slightly rotten plum. Uh wow, that's
a long time to look at cave painting sober. Yeah.
(45:33):
On that note, if you guys have any suggestions for
topics we should cover in the future, like what's the
future of wine or anything else for that matter, you
should let us know. We love hearing from you, so
definitely send us a message our email addresses FW thinking
at hell Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop
us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. At
Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking. At Facebook,
(45:55):
just search FW thinking in the little handy davy search
bar will pop right up. Leave us a message. We
look forward to hearing from you, and you hear from
us again really soon. For more on this topic in
the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot com m
(46:23):
brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, I get
shattered like a lightbulb in an October moon. And I'm
Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. So today we decided
(00:25):
we would talk about something that's very important to us
and really to most people on Earth. Yeah, and that's light. Yeah,
we actually had a brilliant idea. Oh, light bulb went
off overhead, and we decided, let's talk about the future
of light and light bulbs. Kind of a focus on
light bulbs, but well, we have to get to light bulbs.
(00:46):
But well we can talk about the future. Really, what
we mean is focusing on artificial light. Yeah, not just
light that we can get by waiting around till the
sun comes up, right, because artificial light is far more
important and revolutionary to our lives then we often give
it credit for. I mean, think about all of the
(01:07):
ways your life would be different if we didn't have
artificial light. You could only see what was going on
in the daytime. I would have to make wake up
much earlier in the morning. Yeah, I would. I would
have stubbed all of my toes off by now, as
I just wandered blindly through my house. Yeah, I do
(01:27):
that with lights, so I just wouldn't have toes anymore. Well,
I'm of the opinion that the story of artificial light
is actually one of the most interesting questions we have
in how humans have co evolved with our technology. Just
think about the way artificial lighting has changed the way
humans live and sleep. I mean, number one, it allows
(01:50):
us to live in places that don't have a lot
of natural lights, so we can adapt to a much
more indoor lifestyle. Another thing is that, I know some
scientists think that humans used to have different sleep patterns
and we largely have now that back back in the
days before artificial lighting, bi phasic sleep was very common,
(02:12):
where you would sleep twice a day in shorter little
blocks instead of one long sleep at night. Yeah, and
you would actually spend that time between the sleeps doing
you know, various things you might be doing, you know,
actual social visits for example. Right. But as artificial lighting
indoor lighting became much more common and cheaper and more widespread,
(02:33):
that just kind of faded away, and now in most
of the world, it's very common to sleep in just
one big chunk. Or think about all the ways that
artificial lighting has made learning easier. Imagine if you weren't
able to read except like outside in the daytime. Or
think about all of the other human inventions that would
(02:55):
be absolutely useless without artificial light. I mean not not
even including all the ones that use light obviously, like
we couldn't have our computer screen things like that, yeah,
if they didn't emit light for us to see. But
we couldn't have a submarine without artificial light. It's it's
absolutely fundamental, it's crucial, it's a it's a bedrock of
(03:19):
all the other technology that we use in our lives.
I would not be excited about driving a car past dusk, right,
Oh exactly, Yeah, he didn't have headlights. Yeah, it's it's
almost ridiculous to try to imagine the world we live
in without it, and yet it gets no credit. We
we don't really think to be thankful for artificial light
very often. It was a big climb to get to
(03:41):
having artificial light that's as good and as cheap and
as plentiful as it is today. And it makes me
wonder what the future is for being able to see
things artificial light. Yeah, so today we wanted to kind
of dive into the history of how people have create
at light and then talk about some of the ways
(04:02):
that it's that it is going in the future and
technologies that are up and coming that we're excited about. Yea. Yeah,
So we obviously had some source of artificial light, even
if it was pretty crude and not awesome, but we
had some source as soon as we had fire, Bernie,
as you may you may refer to. So, yeah, it
(04:23):
probably wasn't that long after humans discovered fire that they
started to figure out ways of transporting that fire and
keeping that fire burning so that they could use as
a light source. Um. And thus we get to one
of the earliest forms, the oil lamp. So tell me
about oil lamps, Jonathan. All Right, So let's say that
(04:44):
you first you gotta find some form of vessel doesn't
have to be artificial. You could actually find like maybe
a shell or a rock that has a kind of
a hollow a concave area in it, and then you
put some form of flammable material, let's say moss in it,
and you then you soak that moss actually in animal fat,
(05:08):
which would be the oil in this case, and you
light the fire. The oil and moss together work is
fuel so that the fire remains lit. You can actually
move the rock around so that you can carry the
fire with you. And this is the example of an
oil lamp. Uh. These date back thousands of years before
written history. We have found examples of oil lamps. So
(05:32):
so to like, if you're just not done with your
cave painting and you really want to get it done tonight,
you can. Or or if you've gone on one of
those amazing cave painting wine tours with your fellow cave
painters and you're going cave to cave and it's getting laid,
you know, you've got to still be able to see
before you. You know, you don't want to skip the
last cave that was the best one. I think, to
(05:54):
be fair, wine was a little bit after these oil lams.
I'm w h any The pains were notorious complainers. Another
thing I'm not so sure about that. We could look
it up, but I think humans have had alcohol for
a long long time. But you know, you bring up
cave paintings, that's another thing. You know, if you don't
(06:16):
have some source of light that you can carry around
with you. How do you think these deep internal cave
paintings were done when people have to be able to
see their work. Yeah, exactly. So you know what's interesting
to me is that the oil lamp stuck around from
prehistory for a really long time. We're talking about seeing
(06:37):
improvements to the oil lamp made in the eighteen century,
so so thousands of years here, and that's when I'm
the are Gone invented a lamp that was more efficient
and then it consume more of the wick and the oil,
which meant that you didn't have to trim the wick
away like the burning wick. Once it was essentially turned
(06:57):
into carbon, you need to remove it. Um So this
would be the way of where it was more of
it was being consumed, so you wouldn't have to trim
as frequently. Uh So that was a big improvement. But
oil lamps were eventually replaced it by kerosene lamps in
the eighteen fifties. Uh nine thousand years ago is when
we started having wine maybe right, Okay, I was about
(07:19):
to say, like, when did we start having wine in
the office. It's kind of awesome. Uh So, but we
as humans, I got it. But oil lamps were replaced
by kerosene lamps eighteen fifties, which uses obviously kerosene as
a fuel and a wick or mantle as the means
of having the flame. Uh, then we also have gas lamps.
(07:39):
Now this is kind of interesting. So oil lamps and
kerosene lamps neither of those were necessarily good for lighting
something like a street. These were usually small lamps that
were good to carry around. Like if you ever see
depictions of a character carrying a small flame lantern around,
that's probably either an oil lamp or a kerosene lamp.
(07:59):
But gas lamps used coal gas as fuel, and the
earliest example I could find dates from sevent two, so
actually pre dates kerosene lamps. That was when William Murdoch
used coal gas to light his home as an experiment.
I guess if you are convinced that your idea is
gonna work, outfitting your own home with something that could
(08:22):
potentially kill you is the way to go. So did
William Murdoch live long enough to be recognized for his achievement?
He did. He actually eventually outfitted his workplace, which was
the Soho Foundry, with gas lamps and by the early
eighteen hundreds, gas lamps would start to become installed in
several cities in Europe. Baltimore became the first city in
the United States to have gas lamps, and there are
(08:42):
other areas other cities in the US that still have
some gas lamp districts where either the gas lamps were
rebuilt or preserved um like San Diego as an amazing
gas lamp district. Uh and gas lamps remained the main
method of lighting streets and homes until the twentieth century,
so it stuck around for a good while. But somewhere
(09:03):
in the meanwhile, all this time, we've been talking about
burning stuff to create light. What what about this new
fangled electricity idea that was starting to hit the scene. Yeah,
there were a lot of people experimenting with it as
soon as you got volta with a voltaic pile. Once.
Once that discovery was made, everyone was wondering if there
(09:23):
could be really cool uses for this discovery. One of
those people was a British inventor, Humphrey Davy, who in
eighteen o two connected pair of voltaic piles to pair
of the charcoal electrodes and an arc of light emitted
between the two carbon rods. Now, it was not a
practical source of artificial light because one, it was way
(09:44):
too bright. You could not use it to light a home.
It would just be too uncomfortable. The light would be
too intense. The second problem was it consumed those carbon
rods very quickly, so before long you would not be
able to generate light at all. So first it would
be too much light, and then it'll be no light.
So it's kind of like trying to light your home
with a sparkler. Yeah, not not a great not a
(10:07):
great experience at least not if you're over the age
of like ten. So uh. Eventually, Williams State would make
improvements to arc lamps in eighty eight, creating a clockwork
mechanism that governed the movement of those carbon rods to
maximize that fuel to consume as much of them as
possible before the connection was lost. So, in other words,
(10:28):
it would move the rods in relation to one another
to try and keep the art going as long as
it possibly could, and picturing something like a like a
clockwork spit roast. For I'm not sure if that's what
it looked like. I have not seen a picture, so
I'm going to say you were accurate, and I could
be uncertain of that. Uh So the problem was that
(10:51):
State's invention was costly, so it didn't really take off either.
But the the promise of using electricity as a source
of light in some way remained. Well, when did we
get the incandescent bulbs that we're also familiar with? That's
a why did you ask me that question? That's a
full episode right there, Joe. So incandescent bulbs. The the
(11:15):
journey to the incandescent bulb was a very long one,
starting all the way back with Humphrey Davy. But you
have this progression of various inventors who all worked with
electricity to try and figure out how to make something incandesce,
which is all about heat. You heat up a material
to a temperature high enough to make it glow. That
(11:39):
is incandescence. That's what we mean when we say an
incandescent bulb. We're talking about heating up a filament, some
form of material to a temperature high enough where it
will glow. It will get hot enough to glow at
a incredible luminescence so that you can actually see by it.
So we're talking super hot here, warm Yeah, if you've
(12:01):
ever touched a light bulb after it had just been
turned off, you know what I'm talking about. They can
get super hot, um, and we're the ones we're using
today are not as hot as some of the earlier
ones any rate. Uh. The filament is consumed in this process.
Right as you heat it up, it actually begins to
essentially burn away. So that means eventually you get to
(12:23):
a point where the filament is going to break somewhere
along this connection because it's disintegrated enough. Yeah. Yeah, it's
essentially there's they're little breaks that that open up until
there's no longer a connection, Like it just breaks in half,
or maybe not in half, but somewhere along its length,
and you have electrodes on either side. Well, now you
no longer have a pathway for electricity to flow through.
(12:44):
So that's when the light burns out. That's when you
get the the dead bulb. If you ever have picked
up an incandescent ballb after it's burned out and give
it a little shake and you hear that little tingle tinging,
that's the that's the broken filament inside just dancing around
because it's not connected to anything anymore. Uh, so early
incandescent bulbs were problematic because the filaments burned out at
(13:05):
a very short time, and it took some time for
people to figure out how to fix this. One of
the big developments was, hey, we need to remove the
filament from oxygen so that it doesn't burn. So that
means we have to put it in some form of
container and create a vacuum. So early lightbulbs were put
in vacuum tubes, but vacuum tube technology was not very
(13:26):
good in the early nineteenth century. It would not be
until Thomas Edison came around. Thomas Haysen did not invent
the lightbulb. No, he is often credited as the inventor
of the light bulb. He did not. He invented essentially
the first commercially viable lightbulb, the first one to remain
working long enough for it to be an actual, you
(13:48):
useful thing, right. Um So, he started experimenting with a
couple of different types of filaments and eventually discovered that
a carbon coated filament and an oxygen free glass bulb
could last several hours like forty forty hours of light
before burning out. Uh So, Edison was not the first
one to make the use of the container free of oxygen.
(14:10):
Like I said, the other people had other people had
tried to make vacuum tubes, but Edison's approach was sort
of the perfection of that art. Uh. The application of
tungsten um was another big development in this light bulb process,
tungsten being a metal that has a melting point of
up to above six thousand degrees fahrenheit, which is something
(14:30):
around a thirty degrees celsius. And that's high. That's high,
y'all um. Lots of metals give off mostly heat a
k A. Infrared photons um when they're electrified, but infrared
light is invisible and therefore does not help us for
light bulb purposes. Also, if you get most metals too hot,
(14:53):
they'll just melt, which is not useful for light bulbs either.
So uh, you can heat tongue though to a comfortable
like like four thousand degrees fahrenheit or celsius, and it'll
stay solid and emit lots of visible light. So when
I was saying these things get hot, I was not
kidding quite warm. Yeah, But the thing is that a
(15:16):
plain old vacuum tube is not the best thing for
tungsten because when when it heats up like that, it'll
start shedding atoms that will eventually collect on the inside
of the bulb, which will darken it over time, which
again is not conducive to things what you want to
make light for you. But different gases um in in
in that vacuum tube, say inert gases, because you don't
(15:40):
want gasses floating around. And there, yeah, have been different
gases that are in nert have been experimented with nice
and one of the things I want to mention also
were helogen light bulbs. Do you guys have a lot
of experience with halogen light bulbs, so I'm aware of
them my house and my house has is crazy. My
(16:00):
house was made with all these different types of light fixtures,
no two of which appear to accept the same kind
of light bulb. So you can imagine how I feel
whenever a light bulb burns out, like I have to
go through the closet of light bulbs to find the
right one. Some of them are halogen light bulbs, so
they also work through incandescence. They use a tungsten filament
(16:22):
like Lauren was mentioning, so similar but inside a quartz envelope.
That's filled with halogen gas. Now, the halogen gas combines
with the tungsten vapor that's given off while the tungsten
is incandessing. So while normally the filament would be kind
of vaporizing away over time until it breaks and then
your light bulb burns out, in a halogen bulb, it
(16:43):
that that vapor combines with the halogen gas, and the
halogen gas will redeposit tungsten on the filament, So it
preserves the life of the filament. It extends it. It's
not extended indefinitely. It will still burn out, but it
does mean that the hall light bulb will remain viable
longer because of this redepositing. That's so metal. It is
(17:06):
so metal, so that those are the incandescent bulbs. Well,
incandescent bulbs are a thing of the past, right, I
mean that's that's they're more and more places on Earth
where you are not even allowed to buy them anymore
for energy efficiency purposes. That's great, though just esthetically it
is a little sad. I like the globe and incandescent bulb, Yeah,
they are. They do have a very kind of warm
(17:27):
glow to the understandably exactly so that they don't live
as long, and they don't they're not great at energy efficiency. Alright, no,
they're not more what's better. Well, next, we've got the
fluorescent bulbs, which have their own issues, but fluoresce and
bulbs work in a different way. So fluoresce and bulb
contains a pair of electrodes. So that's similar to an
(17:50):
incandescent bulb, but instead of you don't have a filament
in this case, right, you just have you have a
gas filament. I guess it's not a physical it's not
like an actual solid filament. I should say is physical?
Is just gas. So these pair of electrodes. You also
have some mercury. Uh not freddie mercury, which would be facoless. Yeah,
don't don't stuff him into vacuum tubes. That's not no, no, uh,
(18:15):
he's your best friend. So you've got the bit of mercury.
You've got an inert gas usually are gone, and a
phosphor powder coating on the inside of the glass. So
when you turn on a fluorescent lamp, current flows to
the electrodes. All right. That creates a difference of voltage
across the two electrodes, and the electron movement excites the mercury.
Some of that mercury changes from liquid, which is what
(18:37):
mercury tends to be in room temperature, to a gas.
So you get collisions between the electrons coming through the
electrodes uh and the charged particles with the mercury gas atoms.
That bumps up the electrons to a higher energy level,
which is how any kind of photon is created. Exactly.
It's when when an electron returns to its normal energy
(18:58):
state and being yeah, it has to give off that
excess energy. Right, So if I if I excite an electron,
if I energize an electron, so it bumps up to
a higher energy level and then I stop, Well, then
the electron is going to return to its normal state
parties over. Yeah, but then it's like, well, I can't
carry all this extra energy with me. I gotta get
(19:19):
rid of it, so it emits it in the form
of a photon, which is the basic particle of light. However,
in this case, we're talking about photons and the ultra
violet range, which means that you and I can't see them,
and that is where that phosphor cutting comes in. Yeah,
because in this case, the phosphor coating. What it can
do is absorbed that ultra violet radiation. It has the
(19:39):
same sort of uh process where the electrons in the
fosphor coading get excited. They're like, oh, ultra violet awesome,
they jump up and then return to normal, but they
emit light within the visible spectrum. So it's it's kind
of like it's like a step by step process of
trying to get light from the visible light from this
(20:01):
from this approach. And that's exactly how these things work.
So it's pretty cool. Um, literally, much cooler. Yeah, it
doesn't involve in condessing. Of course, now we live in
the age of the L E ED bol yes, and
this is kind of a game changer in a way. Yeah, so,
I mean L E d s also still have a
(20:21):
lot of challenges, but I'll cover that in a second.
Light emitting diodes also, that's what LED stands for, and
they are taught type of solid state lighting or s
s L. So solid state sounds pretty cool. You're like,
all right, so how does this thing work? Well, we
have to talk about semi conductors again. I know, I'm sorry. No,
(20:42):
we love talking about semi conductors. I love talking about them.
I wish I had a truly deep understanding of them.
I have a basic level understanding of semi conductor technology,
maybe a little beyond basic, But I always every time
I go into this, I'm always like, am I explaining
this correctly? So with semiconductors you have You're doing great,
thank you. You have positively charged sections, negatively charged sections.
(21:06):
So the negatively charged area of the semiconductor has an
excess of electrons. That's what creates the negative charge. Right,
the positively charged section we call uh we say that
it has holes. In other words, it has the capacity
to accept electrons. Okay, so it has the ability to
create a flow from one side to the other. Yeah. You.
It essentially says, hey, you know, if you got electron
(21:28):
sent them on over because I got some space, dude,
I mean like we can totally crash over here. I
need a roomy rent is high. You know. It's kind
of like living in San Francisco. So in this case,
you also have an area in between the two where
you it's a mixture kind of. You have the holes
and you have electrons. The electrons fill the first adjacent
(21:48):
line of holes, and unless you give more energy to
the negative side. UH, it reaches a level of equilibrium
where there's kind of a barrier between the the pete
hype that's the positive side, and the N type that's
the negative side UH material in the semiconductor, and that
area in between is called the depletion zone, which I
(22:11):
like to think is where you send Superman villains if
the negative zone fills up. UM. So when you introduce
electricity to the semiconductor on the inside of the material,
the electrons are pushed from the negative side to the
positive side. They can overcome the depletion zone. Now when
they get to the positive side, they enter the holes.
(22:32):
The holes are at a lower energy level than the
electrons the excited electrons are, so the electrons move into
the holes, they emit that excess of energy in the
form of a photon, just as we were talking about
with the fluorescent bulbs, and thus you get light. And
this flow, by the way, only works in one direction. Diodes,
that's a very important electronic component, and that's the that's
(22:55):
one of the cool things about them. They allow electricity
to flow in one direction, but not the their way,
and it has to go from ND type to P
type because it's you know, you can't you can't make uh,
negatively charged particles go into a negatively charged area because
the light charges are going to not not without a
lot of effort. You've gotta push really hard. So, now
(23:18):
that we've sort of looked at where we've gotten to,
what we've sort of caught up with what modern technology
has to offer in lighting, what does the future hold?
I mean, one of the things we can look at
is just the the efficiency of electrical light bulbs. They've
come a long way, right sure, Yeah, Like like why
we're addressing this question at all? You know, like we
(23:38):
have a lot of things that work right now, but
how well do they work? Right? While wiring incandescent bulbs
considered to be awful, when why are these other ones
considered to be great. Here's one experiment you can try. Actually,
don't try this because you might burn yourself. Okay, go
up to an old incandescent bulb while it's on and
(23:59):
touch it. Don't do this. It can get really telling
me to do something and then not to do it. No,
don't do this because you can burn your hand. It
can get really hot. What what is heat? Heat is waste?
He does is wasted energy. Right, it means that you
are you are pouring all this electricity and to generate
the heat, which in turn generates the light. But that's
(24:21):
that means that if there are alternatives where you don't
have to heat up a material to this incredible temperature
in order to get the light, then maybe you could
be more efficient. You're you're you're wasting photons in that
infrared zone, which unless you're Georgy LaForge you cannot see. Yeah.
So ideally what you would want is is some kind
of thank you, thank you, Jonathan, You're welcome. Ideally you'd
(24:42):
want a device where all of the energy going into
it gets converted directly to visible photo. Right, that would
be wonderful. I mean, it's never gonna happen, but it
would be the goal. Right. But the closer the closer
you can get to that, the higher the efficiency of
your bul your light producing uh artifacts. So let's let's
do a quick comparison of the three major types that
(25:04):
we mentioned, incandescent, fluorescent and L E D s. All right,
so incandescent modern sixty what Incandescent light bulbs have a
life expectancy of around twelve hundred hours of use so
well beyond the forty hours the of Edison's first light
bulbs us and by the way, managed to get those
light bulbs up to a much higher hours of lifetime
(25:25):
than forty so they used three thousand kilowatt hours of
electricity over the span of fifty thousand hours of use.
Now you might be saying, wait, a sixty one incandescent
light bulb has twelve hundred hours of lifetime, how could
you get fifty thous hours of use out of it? Well,
you couldn't get fifty thousand hours of use out of one.
You would have You would have to have enough of
(25:46):
these light bulbs to get the equivalent of fifty thousand
hours of use, in this case forty two light bulbs
to get fifty thousand hours of use over that fifty
thousand hours, you would be using three thousand kilowatt hours
of electricity. All right, so we get that all the way. Also,
side note, they're pretty easy to manufacture, Yes, yes, which
is positive for UM. It is important because that factors
(26:06):
into how expensive they're going to be when you are
going to buy them. So while they might not be
terribly efficient, they're also not hard to make, so they're
not expensive. Then you've got fluorescent bulbs, which last for
approximately ten thousand hours, so nearly ten times as long
as the incandescent bulbs. They require fourteen watts to reach
(26:30):
the light equivalent of a sixty watt incandescent bulb, so
they need less of a wattage to reach that same luminescence.
They use seven kilowatt hours over fifty thousand hours of use,
and you would just need five of them to reach
that fifty thousand hours. But they're a little harder to
make a little bit, and they also contain mercury, so
(26:52):
that's another thing that you should remember that if you're
ever disposing of fluorescent bulbs, you've got to be careful
with them because mercury is poisonous. Don't break it up
and lick it. No, well, I don't. I don't know
what would possess you to do that, but definitely don't
do it. Finally, we've got the LED bulbs. They can
last fifty hours on a single bulb, so they can
hit that fifty tho all in just one bulb. Attend
(27:15):
what led bulb can give the equivalent light of a
sixty what incandescent bulb it uses five l what hours
of electricity over the course of fifty hours of use.
But here's the thing about l e ED bulbs, they're
pretty much a pain in the butt to manufacture. Yeah, So,
if you've ever shopped for light bulbs and you've looked
for LED bulbs, thinking I want to be as as
(27:38):
efficient with my energy use as possible, you're gonna see
that the price tag for those LED bulbs is significantly
higher than for your alternatives. And if you did the
math over the lifetime of the light bulbs and the
amount of energy you would use, you would probably see
that the l e ED is going to save you
the money in the long run, but it has a
higher upfront cost. So it all depends on your situation. Right,
(28:01):
If you can afford the upfront cost, then it makes
perfect sense to go and outfit your home with l
a ED lights. Again, like, my house has got all
these different weird light fixtures, some of which do not
have LED alternatives for them. Like, there's not an LED
light that's made in that size yet, or at least
not one that I have been able to find. Uh
So it's an exercise and frustration for me. But even
(28:25):
if they did have all the LED fixtures. I'm not
sure that I would be able to do it because
that would be really expensive to buy lights for every
single fixture in my house. Like that's a big upfront cost.
It is now again, over the lifetime, i'd be saving money.
But if I don't have the cash to pay for
it up front, that it doesn't help run. You know,
(28:45):
one of the areas in which we've talked about using
L e d s for future applications is in vertical farming,
because you know, one of the problems with vertical farming.
We've talked about vertical farming on the show before. The
ideas that you you know, sort of stack up a
greenhouse model within your cities, and this solves a lot
(29:06):
of problems. The crops are less exposed to the you know,
the weather, and so they're they're less vulnerable to changes
in climate and whether they're also closer to their final destination.
Because a lot of the food we consume is in cities,
but you can't grow it in the cities normally, so
it has large transportation costs, their spoilage. Having stuff in
(29:26):
cities is good, but at the same time, it's hard
to get all the light. You need to get even
light distribution for your crops when you've got them stacked
up in in the skyscraper and everything. Everything on the
outside edge is going to have, you know, or at
least everything on the eastern and western sides of the
outside edge, you're going to have plenty of sun exposure.
But some of the other areas, particularly the ones further inside,
(29:48):
are not right. So what a lot of people who
have researched vertical farming have said is that, well, you're
really just going to have to supplement it with artificial lighting. Now,
you you can use artificial lighting to help plants grow
and grow healthy. You can use led bulbs like we've
been talking about. But part of the problem there is,
once you're investing that much money and energy into growing
(30:11):
them in the city with all these light bulbs, is
there really actually an advantage. Yeah, you might be negating
that that cost savings and effort savings exactly right. But
one of the interesting solutions I've seen to this is
the idea of using only pink led light. The idea
behind this is that plants need light to grow and survive. Sure,
(30:34):
they size it right, but they might not need the
entire visible spectrum, so some plants can survive on only
some narrower frequency bands of light. And actually, so there
are these things called pink pink houses, which are growing
facilities that only use certain frequencies of light and use
(30:56):
less energy by doing that and not producing white light,
which is requires all the frequencies of light. Oh yeah, yeah, no,
it makes it makes sense when you think about it
in terms of color theories. And plants are green, they're
they're reflecting a lot of those green spectrum photons and
our wavelengths. I'm sorry, well, either way, I'm still likely correct.
(31:18):
Light behaves is both a wave at a particle, right,
so certainly right right, So so yeah, if you just
shoot the kind of light that they're going to absorb
anyway at them, then you're yeah, anyway, I thought that
was interesting, Yeah, very interesting. Another question is simply how
efficient can we make our LED lights for these kind
of things. LED lights are already very efficient. I mean
(31:41):
we've done a really really good job getting them pretty
during efficient as far as energy consumption goes. Yes, oh
sure sure. And it's definitely a possibility that the expensive
processes and technologies that go into making l ed bulbs
will be streamlined in the future. Those kind of technologies
improve all the time. Oh yeah, that's a good win.
So even if the bulbs themselves can't get much more efficient,
(32:03):
maybe the process of making them can. Yeah, now, and
that's that's definitely something that I think will improve. Um,
maybe it will improve gradually over time. It's kind of
to me it's the same as micro chips. They are
one of those one of those things where we do
get improvements in the processes, but it tends to be
this kind of tick talk approach. That's what Intel calls it.
(32:25):
They'll they'll create the technology to make microprocessors with ever
ever smaller transistors or discrete elements on it, and then
the talk part is where they maximize that technology and
really are able to take advantage of it to the
greatest extent they can before the next tick where they
(32:46):
make it even smaller. So the talk tends to be
a little bit uh more cost effective because they've already
made the investment into increasing the technology so they can
make these uh increasingly small elements on a on a
silicon chip. So we might see something like that for
light emitting diodes, but there are other other alternatives, folks,
(33:07):
you mean, apart from L E d s, there are
tell me about the bulb of the future light which
might not be bulb shaped. Now it might it actually
may not even need to have a and may not
need to be encapsulated in anything. Light emitting electrochemical cells,
so that sounds really complicated. They're sometimes called l E
c s or sometimes l E e c s because
(33:29):
it's light emitting at least. Uh So, well, I guess
it all depends on whether you think it's a hard
see or self see. So it sounds like it's a mouthful.
But the light emitting electrochemical cells, but first, you know,
electrochemical cells are something that we're all familiar with already.
Batteries are an example of an electrochemical cell. So electrochemical
(33:52):
cells are just they they allow either the transmission of
generation of of electricity through some form of chemical reaction. Now,
in the case of light emitting electro chemical cells, well
the whole things in the name, right, it emits light
when you have electricity introduced into this, So it's a
solid state device kind of like LEDs. But let's talk
(34:15):
about it in the form of a sandwich, right, it
would it would be a polymer sandwich because you talk
about whatever's in the middle is the sandwich part, right
like you wouldn't you would say, like a you know,
a roast beef sandwich, lowrist beefs in the middle, it's
not the bread parts. So in this case, be a
polymer sandwich. So the middle of the sandwich is the
(34:36):
light emitting polymer which is filled with mobile ions. Uh.
The bottom of the sandwich, the base of the bulb,
in other words, could be if you wanted it to be.
It could be an opaque electrode wouldn't have to be
the top layer would have to be transparent in order
to let light pass through. Otherwise you would have these
opaque coverings and light would be generated in between them,
(34:58):
but you wouldn't be able to see it, right, Yeah,
that wouldn't be useful. It's a light bulb, it would be. Yeah.
I'd be like if you've got a light bulb dipped
it in paint and then the paint was so thick
that it would not allow light to pass through, it's
not useful. So uh, a lot of them will use uh,
you know, various types of very thin, thin layers to
act as these electrodes that are effectively transparent. Uh So,
(35:23):
like indium tin oxide was used in a lot of
the early ones. I'm seeing now that graphing is starting
to be used in in prototype. Yeah. So graphing, by
the way, in case you forgot, that's the sheet of
carbon atoms that's one atom thick. If you were to
roll graphing into a tube, you would have a carbon nanotube. Um. So,
(35:43):
graphing is being used as the electrode of choice by
a lot of different researchers. And one of the biggest
advantages of l c s over l e d s
is that they are potentially way easier to mass produce.
So we had talked about how l e d s
have this product shin challenge that it's it's a very intensive,
energy inefficient means of making the light bulbs. Light bulbs
(36:07):
themselves are efficient, but the manufacturing process isn't as because
it's it's complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on.
L e c s are potentially way less complicated. You
could print them because you don't have to worry about
precision as much. Printing is not a very precise way
of going about making something because the layers of think
(36:27):
of it as ink can vary greatly across an entire sheet. However,
with l e c s that thickness is not critical
to the operation of the l e C So you
could do it using this kind of method of production
and not worry about impacting the effectiveness of the ultimate
bulb that you create. Yeah, so you can make a
(36:50):
lot of it. Potentially, you can make a lot of
it much more quickly than you could with L e
d s, thus bringing the cost way down for the consumer. Uh.
Now there are some challenges. One of the big ones
is getting l e c s to have their lifetime
up to comparable levels with the other technologies. So, according
to a report in the journal Chemical Science, researchers at
(37:13):
the universities of is It boss L, Basil, b A
S E L. This is where I have no idea
and valencia that one I know how to say. Uh,
they have created l e cs with an effective life
of So that's better than incandescent bulbs already. It's almost
more than twice the lifetime of your average incandescent bulb
(37:35):
at sixty watts anyway, but still well below l E
d s, which are at fifty hours, So it's not
it's it's promising. It's not uh at the level right
now where you would necessarily switch from one to the other,
even if it were ready for for the construction, which
(37:56):
isn't necessarily um. Also, they might never be as quick
acting as L E D s. One benefit of LEDs
is that you turn it on, You flip the switch,
and the bulb turns on pretty much instantaneously, um, which
is also a good point on incandescent bulbs. But depending
on what substance um you're using, as in a mirror
(38:17):
for the L E C, it can take a while
for for the photons to start photoning right, so kind
of like a fluorescent bulb, like an old school fluorescent bulb.
These days they've got these uh these like proactive switches
in them, but carrying a little bit of a charge
to begin with, so that they can they can have
like a dim section, a dim session and completely right way. Yeah,
(38:41):
because I remember those old bulbs where you would turn
it on and you would get the little flickering ink well,
which also can happen as the bulb gets older and
the electrodes start to have That's also where you used
to get the annoying, buzzing noise that fluorescent bulbs used
to make. You don't get it so much anymore because
they have these little starters, as Ned Flanders would say,
they hum like angels. It's odd, though, right, because we
(39:02):
all still have the association of those things when we
think Floresce embulbs. Those are the sort of things we
think about, or at least those are the sort of
things I think about when I think Florence embulbs, even
if it may not no longer be true anymore. Sure sure, um,
So we might never get an L E C TV
is the thing, like, it's probably never going to be
the best technology for things that need to refresh at
a at a constant rate, like like a high graphic display. Um.
(39:26):
But there's some really cool potentials with these things. Um.
For for instance, you can create lots of different colors
of light depending on what substance you're using as an emitter.
UM researchers are actually still kind of working on making
good clean white light from L A C s. It's
the one of the current challenges and getting the product
up to market. If you want a lavender bulbo, they
got the technology for you. But if you want just
(39:48):
a regular white bulb. We're still working so you can
sell it to music venues before you can sell it
to or or high school students from like three light
Oh my goodness, yes, put a unicorn on that baby. Um. Yeah,
and and also um, although l e c's have been
(40:10):
most commonly created on on glass, you can also totally
use a flexible and even stretchable substrates as as your base. Yeah.
This could mean that we have some truly inventive uh
light sources in our future, like things that you know
that we don't even associate with a thing that makes
(40:32):
light now, which is really cool, Like the idea that
with some creative application of this technology, we could have
totally new form factors for light sources, which maybe we'll
end up at tron a boy can dream. So we
had one last bit and Joe, I think you added
(40:52):
this in our notes. Well, I was just recalling how
maybe the future of light is that we don't need light?
Know why? Well, I do you remember back when we
talked about what humans would look like in the future, like,
you know, if humans continue evolving, how will we change?
And there was this one article in Forbes. I think
(41:14):
I recall where there are a couple of people were
speculating they were drawing pictures of these humans with huge
eyes and stuff, and they're like, this is what humans
will look like in the future, or at least that's
how it was interpreted. I think they defended themselves by
saying like, no, no, no, no no, we're just kind of guessing,
and well, they essentially what they said was, we said,
(41:35):
if you take this assumption that humans are going to
be genetically modifying themselves so that they alter their appearance
in some way, and if you take the assumption and
extend it down this particular path, here's what they might
look like. So, in other words, they were saying, we
never said this is what humans are gonna look like.
We said this is what humans could look like, which
(41:58):
I think at that point you wonder why would bother
or even making a picture. Well for the sake of conversation, yea, yeah,
it's interesting, and their argument being that it would be
evolutionarily advantageous for us to be able to see in
the dark when we are colonizing new dark planets. Yeah,
I think they said that it would be actually, uh,
(42:18):
we would re engineer ourselves to have gigantic eyes that
could take in huge amounts of you know, that basically
could see in the dark very well, because that would
be more energy efficient, you know, we wouldn't have to
waste so much energy official lighting if we could just
see in the dark. I mean, aside from the concerns
(42:39):
about how feasible that kind of genetic engineering is, I
don't know. I mean, I it seems kind of far
fetched to me, but I guess I can't dismiss it
out of hand. Maybe someday we would change ourselves. Another
way we could think about it is, let's imagine that
we become much more comfortable with wearing some kind of
(43:00):
goggles all the time, you know, like the next stage
beyond hollow lens and Google glass, we have some kind
of augmented reality tech goggles that we use. Would it
just be that we decide, hey, it's actually much more
efficient instead of lighting all our environments to just have
our glasses all have night vision. Uh. Again, seems kind
(43:21):
of far fetched, but maybe maybe, I guess. I guess
it would depend on on again, how the manufacture of
those technologies moved along. Right now, it's still relatively expensive
to create reliable night visions, so but yeah, if it's
you have to reach that tipping point right where the
(43:41):
alternative is more energy efficient and more economical than the
artificial light. And until we reach that point, the artificial
light is clearly going to be more more abundant. I
just imagine that if we do come to that stage
where we're all just looking through night vision goggles in
(44:02):
dark houses all the time, what's that going to be
like for our pets. I'm just thinking. I think I'm
just thinking of coming home one day and saying, honey,
I looked at I looked at the store lightbulb. Bulbs
are twenty dollars a piece. I'm getting my eyes and
big and they'll be back in. Yes, I think I
think cats pry my eyelids. I think cats would throw
(44:26):
us a party if we stopped putting bright lights on
all the time. I don't know, they might actually get
upset of the fact that we can actually see what
they're up to. Cats cats are very particular about that
kind of thing. Uh, well, this was kind of fun
to talk about the idea of let's just look at
something that a lot of us take for granted that
is a basic element in our lives, something that we
(44:48):
that's all around us all the time, and we don't
necessarily think about that frequently. Despite the fact that we
do associate having an idea with a lightbulb going on,
we don't necessarily actually think about the light bulbs themselves
so much. So this was a lot of fun. Oh
and one last thing before before we go into our
outroar here, I wanted to come back with I had
actually written a thing about how old wine was for
(45:10):
what the stuff, So I'm not sure why I was
totally blanking on it earlier. But wine has been around,
we suspect for about nine thousand years. Cave paintings date
back as long as forty years, so there's a good
amount of time during which people were probably not drunk
unless they found a slightly rotten plum. Uh wow, that's
a long time to look at cave painting sober. Yeah.
(45:33):
On that note, if you guys have any suggestions for
topics we should cover in the future, like what's the
future of wine or anything else for that matter, you
should let us know. We love hearing from you, so
definitely send us a message our email addresses FW thinking
at hell Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop
us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. At
Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking. At Facebook,
(45:55):
just search FW thinking in the little handy davy search
bar will pop right up. Leave us a message. We
look forward to hearing from you, and you hear from
us again really soon. For more on this topic in
the future of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot com m
(46:23):
brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.