How to Make a Lamp out of Lime

by Mike Walker:  Mike Walker

Cost: $10
Time: 30 Minutes
Safe | | | | Crazy

Phones haven't had dials since the Reagan administration, but you still "dial" them. Clocks have been digital for a generation, but time still "ticks" away. And fame hasn't involved calcium oxide for over 100 years, but when you're famous, you're still "in the limelight."

Throughout much of the 19th century, gaslights lit theater stages, while limelights cast a concentrated beam of light on the star. The source of the glow was white-hot quicklime, or calcium oxide (which I order from fishersci.com). Quicklime is much more corrosive than common garden lime-among other things, it's used for disintegrating dead bodies in disaster zones to prevent the spread of infection.

Limelight sounds exotic, but it's just a form of incandescent lighting. In a standard bulb, electric current heats a tungsten wire until it glows brightly. In limelight, it's an oxy-hydrogen flame heating a chunk of quicklime. Different heat source, same idea. It glows for the same reason anything hot glows: When heated, atoms vibrate rapidly, and vibrating atoms emit light. Other compounds, such as thorium oxide, would also work, but lime is cheaper and has the distinct advantage of not being radioactive. And the chunk I used showed no signs of wear after half an hour at 4,300