My First Mercury Vapor Lamp
Wednesday, October 15th, 1980Looking backward from 2009-11-25.
Somewhere around the middle of October, 1980, I decided to see if I could buy a mercury vapor lamp somewhere. Back then, these lights fascinated me with their intense, silver-bluish glow, and I wanted to know how they worked. I’d seen them used as street lights for as far back as I could remember, and I so wanted to have one for my very own.
I remember talking to other students at Connelley Skill Learning Center, where I was attending trade school for electronics at the time. They recommended that I inquire about the lamps at an electric supply company such as Browne and Powell, located on Baum Boulevard in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. So, over lunch, I called the store and they said they had lamps and the ballasts to make them work, and that they’d sell me a builb and balast for around $50.
After school let out at 2:00 PM, I headed out to the store.
The man there was most helpful, and was as eager to sell the lamp to me as I was to buy it.
I took it home. Actually, what he sold me were the innards of a common street light, where the ballast and the lamp socket were attached. In this type of lamp, if the ballast went bad, you could just replace the whole modular unit. That way, along with the new ballast, you’d also be getting a fresh mogal bulb socket as well.
At first, I sat the whole thing on the green dressor with the white top in my bedroom at Jackson street. That worked out pretty well, although the unit hummed quite a bit. Not even sitting it on wads of napkins or several folded towels muted the mumming and buzzing sufficiently. I thought about this and then came up with the idea of separating the lamp socket from the ballast, and connecting the two with a long piece of power cord. The open-circuit voltage at the output of the ballast never exceeded around 250 volts. So I figured I could find a piece of power cord somewhere from a dead appliance to use. It turned out that my roommate at the time had an old vacuum cleaner, which she was about to pitch. So I whacked the cord off of it. I then removed the socket from the ballast frame (secured by two screws).