Drawn to the light he created
At 88, the father of halogen lighting’ is still humbly shopping his new ideas
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Frank Bentayou
Plain Dealer Reporter

Elmer Fridrich’s promotion in 1955 to research associate at GE’s Nela Park didn’t throw him right into the sexiest jobs at the East Cleveland lighting innovation center.

He became “the father of halogen lighting,” as a GE executive called him, in the course of plugging away at the design for a new heat lamp. He and the company patented the bright, bright light source in 1959. Now, with hundreds of millions of lamps sold, halogen lighting has become a fixture in homes, museums and retail stores worldwide.

But his employer couldn’t have realized what he was capable of when they plucked him from his position as a machinist at the company’s hulking factory at East 152nd Street.

He had put his wits to good use there, finding a solution for a problem GE didn’t know it had. He developed a machine to sort 10,000 pins at a time that connected radio tubes. His gadget rejected those that weren’t quite right, performing an essential quality-control task.

It was a huge labor-saver. Formerly, employees peered at lines of little tapered pens as they swept by, 90 a minute. “They would pick out the ones that seemed bent,” Fridrich said with a smile at his home in Geauga County’s Munson Township. His machine automated the job.

Fridrich is still surprising people. Now 88, long retired from GE and a constant fiddler in his cluttered basement, the stooped, soft-spoken man has developed patented ways to reconfigure the almost half-century-old halogen for this century.

His new design, he said, allows manufacturers:

To make screw-in versions that fit in standard lamp fixtures for 40 percent to 70 percent less than it now costs.

To render halogen lamps 40 percent more energy-efficient than previous designs

To create safer versions of the popular light sources that weigh a fraction of their predecessors, a feature that reduces shipping costs.

Fridrich wants to shop his invention to the principal halogen-light brands — GE, Philips and Sylvania — and license the technology to whoever wants to make and sell them.

His hope is to popularize further an illumination source that has “the most beautiful light quality of anything on the market” in a way that provides the low cost and higher operating efficiency consumers want from today’s lighting.

The issue of efficiency — how many lumens of light a lamp generates for each watt of electricity — has become a key issue throughout the world. Two driving forces are the increasing costs of the fuel that not only drives our means of transportation but lights our homes, and concern over climate change as a consequence of burning fossil fuels for power.

The explosive entry of CFLs into the marketplace is a sign of how ready consumers are to reduce power bills and cut air pollution. In Europe and Australia, the curly fluorescent lamps already have come to dominate buyers’ preference. The same thing is happening, only slightly slower, in North America.

But halogen lights impress discriminating homeowners with the natural quality of their illumination over any fluorescent sources available.

Everything changed

when he first saw it

In 1955, when Fridrich first saw that white light in a Nela Park lab, it blew him away.

He was working on units that would create enough heat to bake freshly painted sheet metal, including cars and the coatings manufacturers put on industrial equipment.

But he had the freedom to explore other directions in the prototypes he was using for his experiments. A little iodine in the sealed atmosphere surrounding the tungsten filament, he knew, would permit a higher burning temperature. And the right engineering would eliminate lamp blackening, which had plagued other lighting efforts.

He fiddled with his prototype. Then he and an associate cranked up the most intense light they had ever seen. “We knew right away it was something that we could turn into a successful product,” he said.

The use GE found for it, for the most part, was as a lamp for 8mm movie projectors and slide projectors. They sold millions over the years.

Fridrich said his compensation for such a development was slight. “I had two years of college at Case Institute. I was a machinist working there with all these Ph.D.s,” he said, shrugging.

He retired in the 1980s but didn’t resume working on halogens until the past few years. His interest led him to uncover shortcomings of the 50-year-old technology. He put his still-agile mind to work solving halogen lamps’ problems.

In order to create safe bulbs without the thick protective glass of currently available bulbs, he split the tiny units that produce illumination. A few other engineering tweaks to how the filaments work in their quartz packages made the lamps more efficient and lighter, and cut the cost of making them.

“I think this makes it so everybody in the world could enjoy this wonderful light,” Fridrich said, sitting in the living room of the house he shares with his daughter, Peggy Alexandria, a visual artist who works in batik. She and Fridrich’s consultant, Dennis Dannemiller, are working to find ways to turn her father’s work into a business.

Mark Shepard, GE’s product manager for halogens at Nela Park, specifically referred to Fridrich — as others there did — as “the father of halogen lighting.”

He acknowledged that his technology staff is reviewing patents and technical papers. “But, frankly, we don’t really have anything going on with Elmer right now,” he said.

Fridrich said he just hopes his issued patents and others pending could help assure the income stream he never realized from his development of the halogen lamp five decades ago.

“And I think this kind of lighting is something people will want,” he said.

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