• she/her, they/them, ey/em

Trans, quiet, geek, & humanist. Embedded software engineer and amateur roboticist. Still rediscovering self-expression.


Short-Form Fediverse Account
tech.lgbt/@Mayabotics
Long-Form Fediverse Account
goblin.band/@Mayabotics
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mayabotics.me/
Future Website League Node
meep.lgbt/

The electric arc lamp and sodium-vapor lamp posts have me thinking about how utterly cursed mercury-vapor lamps are.

Toxic, produced UV light, and then that sickly green tint to the light that sucked the life of everything. In short, it was the color of gym class.

I find it interesting that people are referring to mercury-vapor lamps as arc lamps, because it makes logical sense, but at the same time, an arc lamp to me is either a carbon arc lamp or xenon arc lamp, and what I associate that eye-destroying bluish-white color with.


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in reply to @Mayabotics's post:

That's entirely possible, my post was just going off what I remember adults calling the lamps as a child.

My hesitance is that the lamps never produced whitish light, it always had a blue-green tint even when warmed up. Our red gym sweats would look grayish under those lights.

The school building was built in the late forties/early fifties, and still had the original high-bay fixtures in the gym, which I remember being open luminaries with wire guards.

I remember that eventually, the school had to have a fundraiser to upgrade wiring and replace all the fixtures with ones that could be safely used with newer HID lamps. There was a bit of consternation that the upgrade required more than replacing ballasts and lamps.

That upgrade could have easily been to go from probe start metal halide to pulse start metal halide ballasts & lamps, rather than switching from mercury vapor to pulse start metal halide like I thought.