A closer look
Peter Cooper Hewitt invented the modern fluorescent light’s ancestor in 1903, successfully proving that efficiency can come at a terrifying aesthetic cost. His mercury-vapor lamp was vastly cheaper to run than early incandescents, but it lacked red light wavelengths. The result? It cast a sickening, ghostly blue-green pallor over everything, making healthy factory workers look literally deceased. It was so unflattering that nobody wanted it in their homes, forcing Hewitt to market his ghoulish invention strictly to industrial plants and photography studios where nobody cared about looking pretty.
