Mercury staved tubes start of normal, as the hours add up they start to dim and get a pink hue. At some point it will fail to start. As for the dead tube, One of the cathodes may be broken. In a very dark room a broken cathode will have a dim glow try shorting pins to see if starter try's to start the lamp or tube has lost vacuum and one off the cathodes has burnt out. Cool Video 🙂
That’s pretty weird. I think it’s mercury starved. I’m pretty sure what happens is that the mercury gets absorbed into the phosphor over time. The modern low-mercury lamps do that sometimes because of the lack of mercury and they get really dim and pink.
It basically appears to be mercury starved as a manufacturing defect. This bulb is likely a later brass end cap production, dating from 1945 to the late 40s. GE lamps prior to 1945 almost always had the Mazda name, and brass end caps started to disappear during WWII as a result of rationing of brass to make shell casings and artillery, and lamps with aluminum, steel or bakelite end caps started to hit the market. Up until the late 1990s and early 2000s a mercury starved lamp was a very rare occurrence because older lamps had more than enough mercury to exceed the lamps rated life, but due to growing environmental concerns local, state and federal governments began pushing manufacturers to lessen and more accurately dose the amount of mercury in each lamp, and so the low mercury lamp was born, the Philips F32T8 ALTO with green end caps are notorious for going mercury starved before the lamp is completely burned out.
Mercury staved tubes start of normal, as the hours add up they start to dim and get a pink hue. At some point it will fail to start. As for the dead tube, One of the cathodes may be broken. In a very dark room a broken cathode will have a dim glow try shorting pins to see if starter try's to start the lamp or tube has lost vacuum and one off the cathodes has burnt out. Cool Video 🙂
That’s pretty weird. I think it’s mercury starved. I’m pretty sure what happens is that the mercury gets absorbed into the phosphor over time. The modern low-mercury lamps do that sometimes because of the lack of mercury and they get really dim and pink.
It basically appears to be mercury starved as a manufacturing defect. This bulb is likely a later brass end cap production, dating from 1945 to the late 40s. GE lamps prior to 1945 almost always had the Mazda name, and brass end caps started to disappear during WWII as a result of rationing of brass to make shell casings and artillery, and lamps with aluminum, steel or bakelite end caps started to hit the market.
Up until the late 1990s and early 2000s a mercury starved lamp was a very rare occurrence because older lamps had more than enough mercury to exceed the lamps rated life, but due to growing environmental concerns local, state and federal governments began pushing manufacturers to lessen and more accurately dose the amount of mercury in each lamp, and so the low mercury lamp was born, the Philips F32T8 ALTO with green end caps are notorious for going mercury starved before the lamp is completely burned out.
it is possible it may have lost vacuum
See make a dim!