Light bulb makers were worried. In 1973, the oil crisis was starting to bite, so people began cutting their electricity use. This slashed bulb sales. At General Electric, engineer Edward Hammer was assigned to develop an energy-efficient replacement for the incandescent bulb. Hammer wanted to build a bulb based on fluorescent tubes, which generate light when mercury atoms in the vapour inside them are excited by a stream of electrons. His colleagues told him he was wasting his time. The cost would be too high, they warned, and efficiency improvements would be meagre. "I was told that this lamp wouldn't even work," recalls Hammer. "So really, when I built the first one I wanted to see how bad it was going to be." One problem was that such a bulb required the maker to curve the fluorescent tube into a spiral. This meant a lot of its light would be reflected multiple times within the spiral, creating losses and reducing efficacy.
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