Re: salt in the lamp

[Harmon Seaver <hseaver@cybershamanix.com>]

   I recall many years ago trying the salt trick on our Aladdin mantle lamps (we
lived for about 18 years with no electricity or running water and with only wood
for heating and cooking) and it does indeed work to remove the carbon. However,
it also rapidly corrodes the metal burner parts. It was always a sort of
love/hate thing with the Aladdins - such a nice bright light but such a hassle!
    When our children were small they would sometimes come home from school
(they had to walk or ski 2 miles through the forest from the road where the
school bus left them off) in the Winter before we did, and we allowed them to
light the regular wick lamps as it got dark quite early, but not the Aladdins,
since they are so hard to regulate and must be carefully watched.
    This is the second time today I was reminded of those times -- I was fixing
a drain today on the kitchen sink and things weren't going well. My wife said,
"Why don't you just stick the pipe out through the wall and let it run on the
ground like we used to? And then when it froze up you could run out and pound it
with a hammer to break up the ice."  8-)  
    How I wish we could return to that life.


On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 09:44:07PM +0530, A.D. Karve wrote:
> Das mentioned using salt in a mantle lamp. I report an unsuccessful experiment aimed at increasing the light output of a kerosene wick lamp and a candle. Everybody who has learned chemistry in his school would remember how a platinum wire dipped in salt solution and held in a gas flame turned the flame from almost invisible blue to bright yellow.  I thought that the addition of a sodium compound to the kerosene would increase the lux output of the lamp. (Lux is a psychlolgical measure of the light intensity, based on the sensitivity of the human eye. The scientific measure is photon flux or some such parameter). Ordinary salt was tried, but it did not dissolve in kerosene. Soap was also tried, but that too did not dissolve satisfactorily in kerosene.  I then melted wax and soap together and made a candle out of it, but it too failed to give a bright yellow flame.  It is likely that one needs higher temperature of the flame of a Bunsen gas burner to make sodium shine! Or perhaps the soap was made of synthetic detergent and did not contain any sodium!
> A.D.Karve

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com

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