Today, we talk about light bulbs and product
innovation. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
General Electric analyst
George Wise suggests that innovation in industry
takes place in three distinct ways. The most
obvious way is in response to a need. In this
series we've repeatedly seen that things are seldom
so straightforward -- that necessity is not a consistent
parent of invention. Another way innovation occurs
is when it's driven by some revolutionary
discovery. The transistor, for example, triggered
all sorts of new technology.
But Wise is most interested in yet a third
pattern, which he calls the product-driven
innovation cycle. It goes like this: An
engineer works to improve an existing product -- it
needn't be fancy. As he works, he suddenly sees it
in a new light. A radically different concept
suddenly pops out of it. A butterfly is born of a
caterpillar. That sort of thing, says Wise, is far
more common than we might think. He gives several
illustrations.
My
favorite one begins in 1908 when the General
Electric Company hired a young man named Irving
Langmuir. Langmuir was an American with a German
Ph.D. in applied chemistry. Since Langmuir had
studied how air carries heat away from small wires,
he seemed to be just the person to work on heating
elements. GE put him to work on its line of stoves,
flatirons, and other heaters. Langmuir used what he
knew to improve their heating elements. However, GE
had another product that also used heated wires. It
was the light bulb. So Langmuir looked at
light bulbs as well. GE's bulbs were all evacuated
so there'd be no oxygen to burn out their
filaments. Low-wattage bulbs did well enough, but
the tungsten wires in brighter bulbs slowly
evaporated. Tungsten vapor was gradually deposited
on the inside of the bulbs and turned them black.
Then Langmuir realized he could suppress
evaporation by filling the light bulb with an inert
gas that wouldn't burn the filament. The trouble
was, that gas would circulate in the bulb and carry
away too much heat. That in turn would keep the
bulb from staying bright. But Langmuir's research
had told him that a filament wound in a tight coil
would shed much less heat. So he created that tiny
tight coil of a filament you've seen in broken
light bulbs.
Wise's point is that Langmuir was able to look at
one product and then carry what he learned over to
another product. We have the bright argon-filled
bulbs we use today all because Langmuir was put to
work on the much larger heating elements in stoves
and irons.
Wise traces other connections -- how refrigerators
led to turbo superchargers; how steam turbines led
to air conditioners. Of course he's leading us back
to a common inventive process.
Good engineers make one thing turn into another.
They let invention be driven by whatever is there.
So, I suppose, it's little surprise that Langmuir
went on from light bulbs to win the 1932 Nobel
Prize for related work on the surface chemistry of
metals.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Wise, G. Heat Transfer Research in General Electric.
1910-1960: Examples of the Product Driven Innovation
Cycle. History of Heat Transfer: Essays in Honor
of the 50th Anniversary of the ASME Heat Transfer
Division. (E. T. Layton and J. H. Lienhard, eds.)
New York: The American Society of Mechanical
Engineers, 1988, pp. 189-211.
My
favorite one begins in 1908 when the General
Electric Company hired a young man named Irving
Langmuir. Langmuir was an American with a German
Ph.D. in applied chemistry. Since Langmuir had
studied how air carries heat away from small wires,
he seemed to be just the person to work on heating
elements. GE put him to work on its line of stoves,
flatirons, and other heaters. Langmuir used what he
knew to improve their heating elements. However, GE
had another product that also used heated wires. It
was the light bulb. So Langmuir looked at
light bulbs as well. GE's bulbs were all evacuated
so there'd be no oxygen to burn out their
filaments. Low-wattage bulbs did well enough, but
the tungsten wires in brighter bulbs slowly
evaporated. Tungsten vapor was gradually deposited
on the inside of the bulbs and turned them black.
Then Langmuir realized he could suppress
evaporation by filling the light bulb with an inert
gas that wouldn't burn the filament. The trouble
was, that gas would circulate in the bulb and carry
away too much heat. That in turn would keep the
bulb from staying bright. But Langmuir's research
had told him that a filament wound in a tight coil
would shed much less heat. So he created that tiny
tight coil of a filament you've seen in broken
light bulbs.
