Today several different types of lamps and lighting can be found. One of these types is the incandescent light bulb. Also often referred to as incandescent lamp this type of lamp is a source of artificial light. It generally works by incandescence. Usually this type of lamp works when an electrical current passes through a thin filament. This current heats the filament and causes it to become excited. This causes a release of thermally equilibrated photons in the process. One of the components of this type of lamp – the enclosing glass bulb – is mainly used to prevent the oxygen in the air from reaching the hot filament. Without this enclosing glass bulb the hot filament would be destroyed rapidly by oxidation.
The incandescent lamps that have lots of different names have lots of benefits. One of these benefits is that these lamps can be produced for a wide range of voltages. Therefore one can find lamps of that type from just a few volts up to several hundred volts. However these lamps also have some disadvantages such as their relatively poor luminous efficacy. This disadvantage is the main reason why this type of lighting is often replaced in many applications by other types of lamps such as the fluorescent lights, the high-intensity discharge lamps, LEDs or other devices.
Incandescent lamps always had lots of different applications. Usually they were widely used in domestic applications. Furthermore they were also the basis of most portable lighting such as table lamps, some car headlamps and electric flashlights. One of the typical characteristics of an incandescent lamp is that it also produces a lot of heat. This generated heat is the basis for further applications, i.e. it is used for incubators (for hatching eggs), for brooding boxes for young poultry, for heat lights for reptile tanks and also for the Easy-Bake Oven toy.
