Interesting Facts About Flashlights

Flashlights, electric torches or simply torches are hand-held portable electric spotlights. They are known as flashlights mainly in the United States and Canada and as torches or electric torches in most Commonwealth countries.

Typical flashlights consist of a small incandescent light bulb with associated parabolic reflector, powered by electric batteries, and with an electric power switch.

Components found in flashlights are mounted in a housing that contains the necessary electric circuit and provides ease of handling, a means of access to the batteries for replacement, and a clear covering over the light bulb for its protection.

In the last decade flashlights which use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of conventional light bulbs have become available. LEDs have existed for some decades, mainly as low-power indicator lights but in 1999, a corporation in the United States introduces the Luxeon LED, a high-power white-light emitter. And so for the first time this made possible LED flashlights with power and running time better than some incandescent lights.

The advantages of LEDs for flashlights are numerous because these can be significantly more efficient at lower power levels, hence use less battery energy than normal light bulbs and such flashlights have longer battery lifetimes.

There are also some flashlights that have an electrical generator built into them, a type of dynamo-powered flashlights that have a winding crank connected to a stepper motor that feeds several diode bridges with their outputs connected in parallel feeding a field effect transistor that charges a capacitor that connects to one or more LEDs.

There are models that generate electricity using electromagnetic induction. This is accomplished by Shaking the flashlights, a process that will charge a capacitor or a rechargeable battery which supplies a current to a light source, typically a light-emitting diode or, more rarely, an incandescent light bulb.

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