Cooper Hewitt Electric Co.
Hoboken, New Jersey
Cooper Hewitt 'The Traveler' sunlamp
COOPER-HEWITT-ELECTRIC-CO
Peter Cooper Hewitt (1861-1921)
devoted his adult life to scientific
experimentation and -investigation. One
of his major inventions was the Cooper
Hewitt lamp, a low pressure mercury
vapour arc discharge lamp that produced
an intense, cool, bluish-green light. For
illumination purposes the lack of red in
the spectrum limited its applications but
the bright light made it suitable for
industrial lighting equipement. Photo
studios made extensive use of Cooper
Hewitt lamps. In an age of black and
white film, the colour of a photographer's
light made little difference and the amount
of light was most important. Together
with George Westinghouse, Peter
Cooper Hewitt founded the Cooper Hewitt
Electric Co. in Hoboken, New Jersey in
1902. Ultimately, Cooper Hewitt lamps
proved cumbersome to use however. The
necessary electrical ballast was heavy,
each individual lamp had to be ignited
manually and the lamps each contained
as much as a pound of mercury. Newly
developed tungsten filament
incandescent lamps in the 1910s
provided almost as much light as the
mercury tubes but with a much better
colour. General Electric bought the Cooper Hewitt Company in 1919 and in 1933
marketing of a new mercury vapour arc discharge lamp began. Designed in Europe,
this lamp and the fluorescent lamps that followed, used only a fraction of the mercury
Cooper Hewitt lamps did but produced light much more efficiently. The company also
produced sunlamps like the Cooper Hewitt 'The Traveler' on display here, a small
portable sunlamp.
