The Earliest incidence of creating artificial light through a chemical-physical interaction that produced electrons that shed light, was in 1675. Jean Bicard noticed a glow above the mercury in a barometer when carried about in a dark room.
25 years later, Johan Bernoulli (Bernoulli (1700), observed that mercury in a phial well exhausted of air gave a brilliant light whenever the tube was shaken. And the source of fuel does not exhaust.
Francis Hausksbee in 1709 noticed that when mercury was shaken violently in a globe containing air at atmospheric pressure, “particles of light appeared plentifully, about the Figure.
Dybwad and Mandeville (1967) describes experiments in which glass balls containing helium and mercury were spun round by a motor. Light was emitted as a discharge occurred between the mercury and electrons trapped in surface states.
An interesting comparison with this is the Sound and light from a snapping shrimp (Alpheus heterochaelis). They move fast and compress air and water in a move referred to as “shrimpoluminescence”. These sparks may be due to emission of light from small bubble fragments formed during the violent collapse of the asymmetric cavitation bubble’.
I like the idea of the self luminous Buoy Scientific American put out in 1888. It inspired me to think of other uses, and curious as to how we can harness chemical energy.
We can conserve the battery life of moving vehicles, even lighting them up at night while in motion. Light houses can run unmanned for years as long as you had a device to capture the perpetual wind coming in from the ocean.
If we used airships, airship ports could be lit up and visible for miles. Weathervane lined Landing strips in remote areas,
[This is what I think about on my days’ off]
— ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2019, 11, 22, 19913–19919, Publication Date:May 10, 2019 Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.9b07084
Photo credit:-Scientific American 1888
Axford, Pauline & Lawton, Linda & Robertson, Peter & Campbell, Paul. (2008). Multi-bubble Sonoluminescence: Laboratory curiosity, or real world application?. Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering. 7030. 10.1117/12.794199.