This tinkerer's literal light bulb of discovery was halogen

Planning to become a chemical engineer, he enrolled in the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve University). But the curriculum “nauseated me. It was more arithmetic than chemistry.” After two years, he dropped out. As an enlisted man during World War II, he worked in an explosive-powder manufacturing plant, joined a bomb-disposal team, and taught in an Atlanta machine shop, helping injured soldiers learn a trade.

By the time he was discharged, he was married and had two children. “I didn’t have a credential as a chemist, so I took a job as a night machinist at Cleveland Weld Works [a General Electric facility],” he says. “They had problems with manufacturing and I suggested things to do, and they were good enough to let me work on them. Eventually they gave me a room to work on my own.”

There, he devised a machine to package the small leads in radio tubes: Suddenly, GE could box 10,000 leads per minute. Billions of leads were packaged, and the innovation was a frequent stop on the plant’s VIP tour.

That work opened the door to a job at GE’s Nela Park, where Fridrich soon joined a heat-lamp project. Tungsten – the filament that lights up any bulb – kept blackening the glass, rendering the lamps useless. Fridrich recalled an article that described the purification of tungsten and other exotic metals using iodine, and he wondered how a little iodine mixed with tungsten might react when heated. At a high temperature, he reasoned, the iodine or halogen gas would vaporize and combine with the bright tungsten filament – a process of evaporation and deposit that would allow the filament to run hotter, giving more light per unit of energy, all without leaving dark deposits on the bulbs. This “halogen cycle” would happen again and again.

“I went around the lab and discussed this with various people,” says Fridrich. “I got smiles, but not a lot of encouragement. Basically, I was told, ‘Go ahead if you want.’ ” So he did. “Without the iodine, the bulb burned black. But when we added the iodine, it was sparkling clear. It was a beautiful light.”

His invention, which would be used for general lighting, projection lamps, headlamps, and medical lamps, was passed on to academic researchers for further experimentation and refinement. But on the patent, Fridrich is listed first – the primary inventor of the bulb.

GE awarded Fridrich one share of stock, $100, and a lab of his own, where he would keep inventing for the rest of his working life.

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At home, Fridrich’s eight children were sometimes his guinea pigs.

“One day I was getting ready for grade school, and I walked into the kitchen to get my brown-bag lunch,” says Danielson, his youngest daughter, who now lives with him. “Dad had been experimenting with photographic and offset-printing techniques. Printed all over my lunch bag were life-size, photographically reproduced houseflies. I thought it was hysterically funny, but the kids at school stayed far away that day.”

A night owl who generally sleeps most of the morning, Fridrich reads a lot. He lived “green” before it was a popular lifestyle. And even before the federal government passed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, Fridrich was trying to make an affordable halogen bulb.

The legislation, passed last December, calls for the phaseout of traditional incandescent bulbs, which are 90 percent heat and 10 percent light, by 2012. They will be replaced by higher-efficiency compact fluorescent bulbs (which contain mercury) or halogen bulbs. Both options are more expensive.

“I want everyone to be able to take advantage of the halogen cycle for less than a buck a bulb,” Fridrich says. His latest invention is an efficient, long-lasting, safe, and inexpensive halogen bulb that fits inside the standard socket.

For those of us who have to replace our collective 4 billion light bulbs in the next four years, it’s a ray of, well, light, like the one Fridrich sent up 55 years ago.

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