1,400 MILLION CANDLES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 344, 3 May 1928, Page 11

1,400 MILLION CANDLES

POWER OF PARIS FLASHLIGHT Paris. Voltaire's City of Light, boasts to-day the most powerful flashlight lamp In the world, says "The World’s News.” Its light, generated by electric current, is equal to 1,400 million candles. When we consider that 1,400 million ordinary candles, put end to end, would extend eight to ten times round the earth, and almost far enough to reach the moon, we realise how far man has travelled as light-maker since the days of the first tallow candle. Even if mediaeval man had been able to manufacture 1,400 million candles, and put them in 1,400 million candlesticks, the whole population of the world could not have set them alight; to-day a single man moves a switch, there is a maelstrom in the ether, and the light of 1,400 million candles bursts into flame. So powerful is the lamp in Paris that from the top of the Eiffel Tower it would be visible for hundreds of miles; and if the Eiffel Tower were twice as high a man with field-glasses at Vienna would be able to see it quite clearly. The heat in the centre of the electric flame which radiates the light reaches 6,500 degrees centigrade. That is to say, it equals the heat at the surface of the sun!