There's still some LOW pressure sodium around where I grew up on Long Island. You know, the ones that start out neon red and turn yellow after a while...

Great Job !
 

:) I would like to commend Telecolor3007 for your command of the English language . I know of native English speakers who couldn't spell "Fluorescent" to save their lives and to see and read your well written posts time after time made me want to say "Great Job" . I realize with the availability of "spell check" anyone SHOULD be able to produce great writing in any chosen language but a quick look around most English speaking forums will prove that it's usually the native English speakers who make the most blunders . Your well written posts make them a pleasure to respond to , rather than the "seek & find" often played while reading some native speaker's posts .

:thmbsp: So again , great job , and in this case I'm sorry I don't have much to add to your Fluorescent street lighting discussion . For a guy as technically minded as myself I'm now kinda surprised I've never really given much thought as to what's lighting the roads beyond my two (or four) headlights .....

around 2000 i lived in a small town in eastern Michigan called Cass City, it still had flourescent streetlights. but last Time I drove through they had been replaced with high pressure sodium.

@ init4fun : well, it's good there is "Google" for help. Sometimes I don't know how to write some words and I'm looking for help.
English is somehow my second language. My parents intended that I will learn English from an ealy age, I studied English at school starting with the 2nd grade. To be onest only at 15-16 I got more into understanding the language and I still have more to learn.

I don't recall fluorescent street lighting but I do remember seeing them in parking lots of malls, stores, gas stations. I remember around 1979 or so, there was a drive from mercury bulbs to sodium vapor, Mom never liked the orange glow either. There were a few old areas of Pittsburgh that still retained the old pre-WWI street lighting with the old incandescent bulbs up into the 1990's. I did a look on the internet for those old street lamps and the ones I remember date from 1912 or so. Here in Eastern Ohio, they did a lot of work to convert to LED's

Well, I proved your point, I needed spellcheck to spell "fluorescent." :D

You still had incadescent street lighting in the '80's? Wow.

Chicago: http://www.cera-chicago.org/Blog/3304314

In the late 80's or early 90's I bought a very large incandescent bulb at a local freight salvage store, just as a novelty. It appeared to be old stock from the 60's or 70's, a GE. It had unusual markings-I think it included an amp rating but no wattage; had a mogul base. I finally tried it in an old lamp with one of those bases. As the educated on here could guess, when I flipped the switch there was a flash of light, the filament burned out and the circuit breaker tripper. I later learned it was used in a special type of street lamp circuit-series string, I think. I still have the bulb and package because it's kind of neat to look at.

No kidding, and some native English speakers are such poor spellers that they give the impression of never having finished the third grade.

As for your car, am I correct in guessing it is equipped with sealed beam headlights? I don't see many vehicles that are old enough to be so equipped.

I don't recall seeing any fluorescent street lights, but I did get an antique three-tube T12 fluorescent fixture for free last week. Two tubes were done for but the ballast is fine. It has a rapid-start ballast but it also has knock-out plates for preheat starters. It's filthy right now but I cleaned a small part of it to see how it will turn out; it's in very good condition, perhaps all that filth helped to preserve it. The fixture was made by Electrolier Manufacturing Company in Montréal; I haven't been able to find out when they were in business.

The system used a constant current set-up. An old Master's Electrician's handbook explained how the system worked. There was some kind of a reactor with a movable core and weight arrangement that moved in or out to maintain the current.
Each socket had a shunt that would arc through when the lamp went O/C.
There was well over 1000 volts open circuit.

This is the first time I have seen the word "electrolier" and a quick search shows it to be a widely used generic term, so good luck finding the company that used it as a trade name.

This is interesting - history of Los Angeles street lighting:
http://bsl.lacity.org/history.html

I also ran across something called induction lighting - a long-life electrode-less fluorescent lamp used for street lighting:
https://www.accessfixtures.com/induction_lighting/

It is based on inventions of Nikola Tesla long ago.

When I worked at the science museum in Chicago, one part of the electricity demonstration was lighting an ordinary fluorescent tube wirelessly by high frequency induction. We did some tricks (probably originated by Tesla, although I didn't know at the time), like "wiping" the light on and off the tube.

The 1964-65 New York World's Fair had lighting fixtures ("luminaires") that used a special flat panel fluorescent lamp:
http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Spec%20She...0Panel%20F.htm

Manufacture of these panels was discontinued after a few years partly because of poor lifetime due to problems in sealing them thoroughly during manufacture.

Here are some pictures of the luminaires:
https://www.worldsfairphotos.com/nywf64/luminaires.htm

I vaguely remember fluorescents at gas stations & private lots.
They used tubes & were set at a 45 deg angle.
The big thing especially out west is the BIG telescopes can be
made useless by some lighting for some types of research.
Been a big push for years to change out the bad lighting & make
it much more directional. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/abo...s-intermediate
I sure would like darker skies. You can still see the milky here way but
the sky glow is closing in on us.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !