Vintage Atlas Super Five 5' 80W Fluorescent Tubes With Braided Cathodes

A pair of very well used Atlas Super Five fluorescent tubes from 1969.

They may appear no different in design on the outside than most other fluorescent tubes but inside, there's a big difference!

The Atlas 'Super' and 'Double Life' range of tubes employ the patented Thorn braided cathode. The braided cathode is made of a hollow mesh cylinder formed from 8 thin tungsten wires and is capable of holding significantly greater quantities of emitter than standard coiled coil cathodes. Lamp life is more than doubled, in fact these lamps last so long that Thorn reverted back to standard coiled coil cathodes in the 1970s, presumably because the braided cathodes were more costly to manufacture and such long lasting lamps aren't as profitable.

Along with Osram-GEC Liteguard tubes with triple coil cathodes, these are some of the longest lasting and most well made fluorescent tubes ever produced.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• fluorescent
• lamp
• tube
• light
• atlas
• thorn
• MCF
• 80W
• lighting
• cathode
• 1960s
• 60s
• british

[P42STUFF]

@Y0uTube235 Braided cathodes consist of a hollow mesh cylinder formed from 7 thin tungsten wires so they hold a large quantity of emitter inside the cylinder. Standard cathodes used today are simply a coiled coil filament similar those used in mains voltage filament lamps.

[P42STUFF]

@Y0uTube235 They did. In some of the old sales literature they used to say 'double your profits with Atlas double life fluorescent lamps'.

They're running on a 5' 80W SRS circuit. The ends should be very black just before the tubes reach EOL as the cathodes contain a great amount of emitter compared to standard ones and they are unshielded. Some of the later Atlas Super lamps did indeed have cathode shields. They can operate cold cathode at EOL, usually on SRS circuits.

[P42STUFF]

@Y0uTube235 I've got that down in the description, it's a hollow mesh cylinder formed from 8 fine tungsten wires braided together.

[TheDieselNut]

Very nice find!!