WORLD FIRST LED FLASHLIGHT TORCH ?

Back in the late 1990’s, I was into night cycling and to have the brightest and lightest light source was the goal.

At the time filament bulbs were still the best option and white power LED’s had not arrived. 

They were still more as indicators rather than as a light source.

I worked for Symbol technologies in their custom products section. This would get us involved in all manner of things and new technologies and customers with interesting requests. 

On one such day back in 1999 a Sony representative dropped off some new-fangled Lithium-ion batteries for us to play with. Much of our equipment was hand held, so batteries technology was our thing.

I used some of these to convert a standard 3V cycle light to drive a 6 cell Duracell bulb at 9 Volts.

The total package complete weighed in at 80 gm, gave about 8 Watts and was rechargeable. 

No one had tried this before as the cell costs were very high about £40 each in 2001.

The era was still dial up modems for internet @4Mb, you could still get change from a Gallon of fuel at the pumps or £0.60 a litre, and public phone boxes still in the street.

The company was developing many new products and among our customers was forensics and law enforcement. As one conversation leads to another it was remarked that the long stick batons and 6 Cell Duracell Maglite’s were being withdrawn in favour of the shorter telescopic truncheons and 3 cell shorter torches. 

Political correctness had deemed that in the event of officers being outnumbered and faced with uncooperative natives meaning them harm might have to resort to using these items to defend themselves. This would give them an unfair advantage. 

These ideas emanate from “can’t do, won’t do” people who live in a perfect world and instruct others on “how to, could do and should do”. 

Reducing the cell number also reduced the battery budget by 50% and giving the offices only half the light output to search with. This at least made the accountants happy.

At this time a manufacturer had released the brightest white LED to-date about 200 – 280 mcd. 

I drew up an engineering drawing and spoke with a local engineering company and struck a deal. 

I would buy two new Maglite’s then modify and build them. This was my MK2 about 2001. They would do the machining for the module. It would be hard wired into the flashlight, I would keep one and they the other and no money changed hands. When build it had a light output shy of 2000 Lumens. If it was not the first LED torch, then it was probably the brightest at that time.

This I loaned for trials to the officers. After a few days they reported back that as a search light it was not as good as a filament bulb with a parabolic shaped reflector and too bright to use while doing paper work at night. It gave off a very bright ambient light

What was a big positive was the fact that it gave off little light reflection at night when looking through glass. This is very useful for vehicle windscreens and windows in buildings.

I took on board all their observations and made a MK3 version. This was to be a drop in retro fit unit. This would give them the option of choosing the function to use the flashlight for on the day. The retro fit module had 2 functions, one was very low light, ran 4 LEDs and the cells would last 1000 hrs. 

It was sufficient background light and they could do paper work from this.  The second function was to screw the head of the torch down further; this would cause it to operate at maximum brightness. 

3 of these modules was made and trialled. Very well received to the extent I was never going to get them returned as they were not going to part with them. 

I offered the design to Duracell and Ever-Ready but they never came back. Sometime later all the big manufactures starting to make LED flashlights. Took them a while to match my brightness but I would not be able to compete with big business. It was time to move on. Much has changed since then and I now own commercial offerings some 28000 and 50000 lumens plus.

By HPR Solutions Ltd