WW2 Searchlight Training Video, Carbon Arc Sperry GE скачать в хорошем качестве

WW2 Searchlight Training Video, Carbon Arc Sperry GE

This is the real thing! A RARE US Army video from 1940 that shows exactly how to operate a single or a battery of WW2 Searchlights. These lights were made by either Sperry Gyro, or General Electric. They each had an output of 800,000,000 candlepower, had a beam angle of 1.5 degrees, and could light up bombers at 30,000 feet like daylight. There are VERY FEW operational examples of these lights today, after most were dumped overboard on boats on the way home, left to rot, or burned up all night long for decades at used car lots well into the 90's. To this day, they remain one of the brightest man made lights in history. The 60 inch diameter "mirrors" were actually made somewhere in Indiana of a top secret brass and copper mixture, and weighed 340 pounds, and were coated with a layer of Rhodium (white gold). Glass mirrors were only used in very few Navy versions, which had aluminum bodies. None of those lights still exist today. The mirror's reflective efficiency (when new) was only about 80%, making the thought of a modern, 100% efficient glass mirror's output absolutely frightening. The very few lights you may be lucky to see running around town nowadays have an efficiency of maybe 40-50% at best, and yet they still produce a truly remarkable beam output. These lights were very complex, and had a service/engineering manual of well over 1,000 pages of some of the most amazing, well written, and remarkable engineering language for 1940, and the lights had a truly remarkable level of "auto analog" control to maintain a constant arc size and DC amp draw, and as such were very much TOP SECRET assets at the highest level when made, costing an absolutely staggering unit cost of nearly $1 MILLION each in real 1941-42 dollars! Yes, this is true. Each B17 bomber cost the US Government about $110,000 in 1941. These arc lights were on two trailers, and powered by a large trailered DC generators with a very common straight 6-cylinder "Chris Craft" boat engine, and the lights burned 18 inch carbon rods, which put out some REALLY nasty Co2 and various other fumes, as well as a monster amount of UV light. They were also loaded with asbestos wire. They were never intended to run for 3 hours at a time, but they were so overbuilt they could easily do so. To this day, these WW2 lights are some of the most incredible technology to ever come out of WW2, and their beams can still be seen in some cities on special nights from up to 50 MILES away on a dark night. These were serious war instruments, and each mirror had its unique, exact focal distance stamped on the rim (somewhere around 37" each) with a focal variance of much less than 1/2" from the center of the arc to the center of the mirror in order to maintain a perfect 1.5 degree beam angle as desired for planes. To this day, the exact forged brass/rhodium bonding mirror mfg. process is still UNKNOWN- nobody knows how these massive 60" mirrors were actually made somewhere in Indiana. These lights are truly one of the most amazing things created by man, and were DECADES ahead of their time.