A monument to Thomas Edison, one of the inventors of the incandescent lamp, is to be lit with LEDs when it reopens after two years of renovations this summer.
The 14-foot-tall glass replica incandescent lamp which sits atop the 118-foot tower on the site of Edison's 'invention factory' in Menlo Park, New Jersey, used to burn with an array of incandescent lamps, but the lamps were unreliable and maintenance proved awkward for the museum because workers would have to navigate a narrow ladder to access the tower. The new project will feature retrofit LED lamps in their place.
"I know there are other people wondering why we're doing that," Christa Gaffigan of project architects Mills and Schnoering told NJ.com. "But it's definitely for the energy efficiency. It's on the forefront of lighting."
The Tower is one of only two Art Deco monuments in New Jersey. It was constructed using precast architectural concrete panels with exposed aggregate - the work of John J. Earley, a concrete pioneer. Earley utilized 13 different aggregate colour mixes to give the Tower a graduated "dark to light" appearance that focused attention on the lamp at the top.
"I think he would see [the switch] as a good thing," Paul Israel, a Rutgers professor and a Thomas Edison expert, said at a recent meeting of the Edison Tower Corporation. "He was very aware of the inefficiencies of the electric light system…He'd have been even more pleased if [the LED technology] came out of his lab. If it came out of someone else's, maybe not so much."
