Cool Stars

Floodlights commonly used in cinema studios may heat up small sets, make actors too uncomfortable to do their best work. Beads of sweat on shapely noses and fine foreheads will ruin takes. Last week a bulky Dutch physicist named Cornells Bol, working at Stanford University, had film producers interested in a tiny, super-powerful lamp which will keep their stars cool while working.

Bol's lamp is a stout, strongly sealed quartz tube less than a quarter-inch in outside diameter, with an inside diameter of .08 to .04 in. It contains neon to start an electric arc, is so full of mercury that when the arc vaporizes the mercury, the pressure rises as high as 300 atmospheres. At the core of the mercury the temperature is 14,000DEG F., on the inside wall of the tube 1,800DEG. The lamp is served by a water cooler in which the water must be hurried along in its jacket to prevent the formation of steam bubbles. The heat given off is negligible, since the light of mercury vapor slides off the visible spectrum at the opposite side from the red end where heat waves predominate. The lamp, however, sheds enough red light for filming.

A five-inch lamp, no bigger than a clinical thermometer, gives a maximum of 80,000 candlepower. A lamp of this length requires 8,000 volts (1,600 volts for each inch) but the current is only 1.5 amperes. Physicist Bol believes his little tubes will be useful for lighting airports, cinema projection, treatment of skin diseases. He has leased manufacturing rights to General Electric Co. and Philips Glow Lamp Co. of Holland, declared last week that two motion picture companies had approached him with offers. Cost figures were concealed last week but a Bol intimate said they were "ridiculously low."

Cornells Bol talks wittily in his imperfect English, likes sloppy, comfortable clothes, has a plump wife and five chubby sons for whom he keeps a horse and a ponycart. Born in Holland 52 years ago, he came to the U. S. in 1907 to study at Princeton, Stanford, the University of Montana, returned in 1916 to his native land where he worked on the development of sodium vapor lamps in the Philips laboratories and devised a way of sealing chrome steel to glass in X-ray apparatus. Last autumn he again bobbed up at Stanford as a research assistant. "Europe," he said, "iss no blace to bring up fife children." Stanford is financing his present work, expects some share in the profits.

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