Thanks for reviving the thread, I remember reading it a few weeks ago but then had to go to China and was too busy, and after that forgot to reply.
I also think this is an excellent idea, and would be pleased to contribute to such a resource. But like others I struggle with what might be the best platform. Below you find a few thoughts that should be considered before we might proceed with such kind of collaborative resource.
Organisation of InformationThe proposed topics from Multisubject are good. But I think there are others as well. Some 25 years ago I began organising this kind of information for myself, in the form of an Excel spreadsheet which in the mean time has become quite huge. It is split into several different tabs for the various kinds of information. The titles of these have evolved several times over the years, as I struggle to come up with discrete sections which keep the information well organised and easy to find, but with the minimum of overlap. I hate duplication of information in more than two sections, because inevitably over time updates could be made to one but not the other and things become desynchronised. Below is the present structure but even this is not ideal, and input from others would be most welcome:
- Products (a listing of lamps, grouped per technology and then year of introduction, inventor name and company where known, and brief technical description)
- Processes (chronological listing of the evolution of key manufacturing processes / raw materials, which often enable multiple different product types as listed above)
- Patents (key inventions related to light sources and control gear, grouped by company, year, and technological classification of type of product, process or material)
- Papers (important scientific papers, news articles, press releases etc, related to light sources and control gear)
- Books (as above, but a listing of what I consider to be important books for researchers of lighting history)
- People (brief biographies of important lamp inventors, company founders, businessmen, and those who influenced the lighting industry)
- Lamp Theory (brief descriptions of the fundamental theories that resulted not necessarily in an individual new product as listed above, but a complete family of lamps)
- Companies (list of all known lampmakers around the world, each being subdivided into the chronological steps of their founding, evolution and closure)
- Factories (similar to the above but covering only the chronology of each factory within a company)
- Brands (shortlist of brand names used by manufacturers, since these were often multiple, with link back to the owning companies)
- Associations (listing of Lighting Associations around the world, and key dates which resulted in major changes for the organisation of the lighting industry in their territories)
- Statistics (general industry stats, e.g. how many lamps of a particular family were manufactured each year in each global region, evolution of selling prices, etc.)
- Electrical Specs (list of FL and HID lamps, with specs of their operating voltage, current, electrodes, ignition, ballast parameters etc, taken from Standards and catalogues)
- Performance Specs (evolution of e.g. HID lamps, how their lumens and life improved over time, based on catalogue references)
- Lamp Classification (e.g. ANSI, LIF, military codes etc, some of which are in the mean time added to my website)
- Standards (overview of many international standards that provide information on light source operating parameters)
Accuracy of InformationFor every point in any of the above sections, I have a "References" field which provides links to the original published sources of information. That might sometimes cross-link from e.g. a product invention on one page to a patent or paper in the other lists, or to a book or catalogue, and many of course also link to specific pages online and here on LG where the members here have made important discoveries and statements. As soon as you begin to build such a database, you quickly realise how much conflicting information exists. e.g. one article might state with certainty that a particular lamp was invented in a specified year, whereas others might place it a year earlier or later. As time moves on, or when articles are written by authors from one country about an invention that originated elsewhere, those error boundaries become blurred. It's not uncommon to see authors getting their facts wrong by as much as a decade. Which is then correct? I also struggle very often with fake news, which certainly existed a century ago. Very often multiple companies like to claim that they were the original inventor of a particular product, but usually only one is telling the truth. It's very important to document each source of information so that when new references arise, they can be quickly checked against the other sources. Over time you can piece together the truth, and I then make a small statement on which reference I consider the most trustworthy (or not), and the reasons why.
Sharing of InformationFor many years I thought I was the only one with this interest, and did it purely for myself as a tool to organise the info that sits behind my website and collection. During the past few years it has become clear that there is a hard-core of members both on LG and elsewhere who share this interest for the finer details, and in many cases their findings have helped expand my spreadsheet. But I do not feel ready to publish the whole file on my website or here, because the information is not in a presentable format. It's just a serendipitous collection of information that I may randomly come across, and hardly a week goes by when I do not add something new. I am happy to share the file privately with any individuals who might want to make a serious contribution, and indeed have already done that with a few members. But the question then arises on how to keep it up-to-date, and accurate.
I have often thought about simply uploading the whole Excel file to Sharepoint, so that multiple pre-authorised users could read and contribute to the same file in real time. This could work. But for me, accuracy of information is of paramount importance. A lot of people including myself have made statements about particular aspects of history, lamp design or applications which we may believe are true, but actually are not. It worries me that if I place the file online for anyone to add to, incorrect information will be added and the quality of the resource will be diluted. Wikipedia and the Facebook sites are perfect examples of what absolute rubbish tends to emerge in such cases. Years ago I did share my file with other collectors, to enrich it with their own additional info. While a lot of that was extremely valuable, at the same time I began to see years later that they had entered other info that was completely inaccurate. It took me a long time to gradually correct that, or put strong question marks next to some points as being unverified, and requiring a reference to be added before I can believe it. So it is clear that some kind of "editorial board" would be required to verify information if we do make it all public. The References field I have added might partially solve that. If it was religiously filled out every time, which even I have not done, at least if a questionable statement later emerges it would be possible to verify that against an original source.
Presentation of InformationI think the present Excel format I have may be OK for researchers, but not easy for anyone who simply wishes to look up information. Is there a better way of organising the knowledge? Probably yes. But I do not know how. For sure, I am certain that it is not via any database software. I have tried that many times over the years and given up, because you quickly lose the overview of information. A database is great for providing container fields for specific pieces of information - but in my case, the info in one field has close links to its neighbours and other "cells". If you can only see one cell at a time it's very difficult to compare with the chronology of info in other cells. Moreover, for a database to work the categories must be well defined, and my problem is that these are also evolving over time. In a spreadsheet its fast to shift cells around and restructure things, but in a database the quantity of work in managing it can quickly become prohibitively large.
In terms of lamp specs alone, I must say that I do like very much the structure of the Russian website
www.old-lighting.ru. I think its authors have done probably the best job of any lighting website worldwide in organising historic information. They do of course have the very big advantage that in the former USSR there was an impeccable system of classifying lamps, and indeed most electrotechnical articles, the likes of which never worked in any capitalist country. Whatever kind of lamp it is, be it a simple incandescent GLS or candle or reflector, fluorescent, discharge, LED, electroluminescent or whatever, they have a fantastically well structured system of nomenclature which precisely identifies the model. Moreover since technology and information was openly shared between manufacturers, the products of one company are substantially identical to the competition. The webmaster has made full use of that structure to enable multiple lamps of the same type to be grouped together, easy to find, and providing cross-references to specifications, datasheets etc. For instance, if on LG you want to look for information on 250W high pressure sodium lamps with deluxe spectrum, you have to run a dozen different searches based on different manufacturers brand names to find all examples, one by one, with painstaking effort. Even then you always miss some. On Old-Lighting you just run one single search for the Soviet type code, and immediately see all related products from all manufacturers, and all comments, datasheets, technical specs interlinked together.
I have tried to do something similar for my own database and collection. It is more difficult because of the great variety that exists between competing manufacturers, but has partially worked. This type code is then used to help me group together for instance, specific papers, patents or lamp examples of a particular type. It works 90% for my own collection, but would probably require further refinement to accommodate lamps and info from other collectors.
Access to Original InformationWhat Alex says is correct - getting access to original scientific papers, at least in the Western World, is an extremely expensive and difficult quest. This is one of my greatest hates of how the West operates. The taxpayer pays into government funds, which are then distributed to universities, industries and associations in the form of state-funded grants to fuel scientific research. These organisations disclose the results of their work via scientific papers, which are published by industrial and academic journals. In the past, one could subscribe to these journals at low cost, and readily find them in city libraries etc. In recent decades the former enormous breadth of publishers has amalgamated into a very small number of huge publishing houses that take over the rights to the content. They also go around buying up the rights to the historic publications of former smaller journals, and then guard the information with abnormally high levels of secrecy which can only be circumvented by extortionate financial payments. The high fees can usually only be afforded by the larger universities and research institutes, and for a few years students and researchers within those organisations have partial access to that information. But the taxpayer has virtually no access to the research that he originally funded. Smaller businesses and industries also cannot afford this. The collective human knowledge is in my view completely wasted, for the sake of financial profit. Perhaps since my company was taken over by the Chinese Government, I have developed a different view here. They take the view that the wealth of human knowledge should be accessible for the sake of fuelling further scientific growth and innovation, and it is the policy of many non-Western governments to do precisely that. As a result, access to historic lighting papers is possible and entirely free from within those regions. It is of course not authorised to access our own historic information from the West, but every day millions of scientific papers are downloaded and used by the rest of the world to help their own companies innovate, and indeed we see that they do this with fantastic performance and the old Western countries strict regulation of scientific knowledge is now pulling them down. ``
Over the years, I have obtained access to many hundreds of historic lighting research papers by legal means - either while I was a student, or employed in industry which paid for them. As such, I do have both a paper and digital library of scientific papers, news articles etc. What to do with this? I would probably end up in prison if I placed this information online in any Western country. I think it's not even allowed to share it between private individuals : copyright rules of the present owners only allow sharing small excerpts, individual diagrams etc, but never the full article. However, most of what I have has already been uploaded by others to literature databases like the Russian Sci-Hub and the Chinese Z-Library project. Usually the West does everything possible to block access, but more often than not, if you are persistent enough it can work. Perhaps some kind of listing of all light-source related papers, with links to the actual full content in other global regions might be useful and not get us into trouble with the Western profiteers? Or at least a listing of the papers and then people must make their own efforts to find a source?
ConclusionThe topic is so huge that I recognise I do not have enough time to do it myself, and indeed no one person can find all sources of information. So I am very open to the idea of collaboration and would rather put time into a group resource rather than pursue my own isolated references. But I really do not know how best to proceed. If any constructive thoughts come out of this thread I would be enthusiastic to support them. In terms of hosting, my own website skills are probably too limited to be of much value. If however someone else is expert at that, and would wish to add it to my website, I am also open for that idea. But perhaps a link via LG may be better and more neutral, if of course this site's owners would be interested in extending the resource in this exciting new direction.
