Electric house of the future: 1939's promise

Popular Mechanics' August, 1939 feature "The Electric Home of the Future" features the kind of boundless, electrical future hovering on the horizon for the brave people of 1939.

In the not-distant future, the home may well be equipped with “mood control,” which is made possible by newly developed light sources. It’s possible that people will suit the light and color of their rooms to their moods. These new-type lamps produce colors of warm white, daylight white, gold, red, blue, pink and green. It’s up to the psychologists to figure out the proper combinations of colors to lift one’s spirits, when they are down, with a flood of brilliant light, or subdue a sense of excitement with soothing mellow light.

These new lamps are highly efficient colored-light makers, producing from ten to fifty times as much light per watt as has been possible with incandescent lamps. They utilize a very low-pressure mercury vapor discharge which produces ultraviolet radiations, giving little direct visible light or heat radiation. The inside surface of the glass tubes is coated with chemicals which glow when struck by invisible ultraviolet radiation. The combination of chemicals used in the coating of the lamp determines the resultant color.

It is even possible that in the future we may produce on a commercial scale similar lights by bombarding the fluorescent material of the lamps with short-wave radio beams.

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