How do bedside touch lamps work?

How do bedside touch lamps work?

How do bedside touch lamps work?

The ability to turn on a lamp just by touching it arouses curiosity in most of us. However, in of itself, it is not that amazing. The amazing part comes from the switches themselves that turn on lights in the first place! Most of us are guilty of taking the technology for granted. Thanks to guys like Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin back in those old days figuring out electricity for us, we now have beautiful decorative bedside touch lamps to enhance the style of our bedrooms and homes.

So what's the deal? Well, little actually separates your average lamp with a manual switch from a touch lamp. In touch lamps, the electrical switch that turns the light on and off is inside the lamp instead of outside. To understand what is actually happening to make the light switch, we have to take a crash course in electrical (lamp) science.

You see, everything has a certain capacity to hold an electrical charge (which is what they call capacitance), including the human body. A lamp has a certain capacitance on its own, so this means that if a circuit tried to charge the lamp with electrons, it would take a certain amount to do so. By touching a "touch lamp", your body adds to its capacity, causing it to "switch". Many different properties of the human body have been utilized for years to flip touch-sensitive switches like this. Some applications for example, use the human body's heat to execute the "switch", such is the case with motion-sensitive lamps.

So essentially, your touch lamp works because your hand acts as a conductor of energy. If you'd like to think about it like this, you are the switch! Well, I suppose you knew that already in a sense, because obviously YOU are touching it to execute it in the first place; but I just gave you as a the switch' a deeper meaning, didn't I?

Also, many touch lamps can shine light in multiple brightness levels without having to use three-way light bulbs. This is because when you touch these lamps, they don't just cycle on and off, they transfer to different levels from dim, to brighter, to brightest in a succession that occurs because the power source is actually turning itself off and on in this quick succession. This cyclical action appears to the naked eye to be coherent, but because the light source is not getting all of the energy it would be getting if the electricity were on constantly, it does not shine as brightly and is thus, dimmed.

So that is basically it in a nutshell, that is how your treasured touch lamps bedside work. We could go on and on about the further details, the electrons and the nature of particle physics, but I'm sure your curiosity is quenched at this point! And you and I care more about the style, and personal home decor of the touch lamps anyway, right? Well, I do at least. If you'd like to learn more, there is plenty of information on the internet about the physics behind these lamps.

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