Don’t tell Ed Hammer he can’t do something because he’ll likely prove you wrong. Forty years ago as a GE lighting engineer at Nela Labs, Hammer was told his idea for a new energy-efficient compact fluorescent light (CFL) wouldn’t work. No one had been able to transform large gas-filled energy-efficient lights into a practical shape that fit the common table lamp. But in the 70s, a national energy crisis was in full swing. Engineers knew fluorescent lights were much more efficient than old incandescents and would cut consumers' skyrocketing light bills. But there was just one problem; how could you make them?
Hammer had an idea. He tinkered in the lab with a new double-helix design, successfully bending a 25 watt gas-filled glass tube into a curly shape with a common light bulb-sized fixture. The next day he brought in a table lamp from home, twisted in the strange looking bulb and
voila! “I screwed it in and they liked it,” he remembers.
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