The implications of such a discovery on the development of visual communications media would prove to be staggering. Photographic emulsions, not to show up on the scene for another 35 years, could be illuminated from behind and an image projected onto a screen (the basis of slide and motion picture technology). People could read and study after dark much better with this powerful source of light. A crude beginning had been made in the technology of electrical illumination. A modern computer monitor produces light using the same principles of physics (phosphors ionized into luminescence by an electron beam) but in a much gentler way. The unfortunate part in all this was that battery and electrical generating technology had not developed enough to make the carbon arc more than a laboratory curiosity. An Englishman, William Staite, who did pioneering work with the carbon arc in the early Nineteenth Century is not well remembered today for his contributions. Finally, in the 1870's, batteries that could power arc lamps became economically feasible. An outdoor football match was illuminated with carbon arc lamps in 1878 and the arc was developed for use in heavy duty industrial lighting during the remainder of the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century. Carbon arcs are too powerful for domestic lighting. Their main uses were massive outdoor illumination. antiaircraft searchlights, and motion picture theater projectors.
carbon arc experiment that can be performed in the classroom.