Description

This flash lamp consists of a long metal tube with a metal cap at both ends. There are two portruding metal pieces along the length of the tube. There is liquid mercury inside the glass tube.

Harold Edgerton and his associates Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert Grier made strobe lamps in all shapes and sizes— as Edgerton's sketches in his laboratory notebooks illustrate (see the notebook entry from May 17, 1931). This early flash tube uses mercury to create a blusish light to illuminate high speed black and white photogrpahy. This tube is a later design than Edgerton’s first creation (an adapted General Electric mercury rectifier, see 1983.088.054). For later flash lamps, Edgerton and his associates experimented with pumping different gases into the lamps, in addition to the mercury used in the first tubes.