I guess I’m just plain getting old.  Yesterday I celebrated a great birthday with as full a day of fishing as I wanted and then came home to begin packing for a long awaited camping trip with the boys and their families.  That begins tomorrow so for right now I must tell you about what great gift I received.

A side pocket mini mag light that emits 226 Lumens of bright light!

Let me just say, when I turned that little bad boy on I could almost feel the light intensity leaving the front of the flashlight handle.  Nearly like shooting a gun, the barrel of the flashlight sort of came back into my hand a little bit.

Man is that little flashlight a bright one!

I asked around the patio if anyone knew how many candle powers makes up one lumen and of course nobody knew.  So, with that I knew exactly what I had to do for todays posting on bears butt dot com.

I looked up lumen v.s. candlepower and found abruptly that one can not measure such as that.  WHAT?  It seems scientifically not possible.  But I asked myself why not?  So many candles emit so much light.  This flashlight emits so much light.  Emitted light equals Emitted light.

So, what I found was that : “The lumen can be thought of casually as a measure of the total “amount” of visible light in some defined beam or angle, or emitted from some source. The number of candelas or lumens from a source also depends on its spectrum, via the nominal response of the human eye as represented in the luminosity function”.

This was quoted directly from Wikipedia of which I am become indebted.

Now let me dissect what this statement says.  In the body of it there is the word “candelas”…AH HA!  Candelas = Candles….at least to me they do.  And I will run with that.  It also says “or lumens”, which means that Candelas and Lumens are the same, but we know ( or should know) that it takes a whole lot more Candelas to make up one Lumen and based on what it continues to say is that “depends on its spectrum, via the nominal response of the human eye”….

Close your minds eye for a moment and picture one candle burning in a totally dark room.  Notice it flickers some, but notice more the color of the flame…a bit yellowish/orange…is yours the same as mine?

Now light another and place it in very close proximity to the first.  Two candlepower…twice the light of one.  Light a third…three candlepower…three times brighter than one.  Light a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth….keep going until you can see enough to read in the darkened room without squinting.  You might have to open a door or window because it is going to be quite warm in the room.  There you have what I would call “One Lumen” of light.  So, how many candles did it take to make it so bright.  You count them as I don’t have the time to do it right now.  But, whatever number of candles you lit to produce that much light is how many it takes to emit one lumen of light.  Multiply that number of candles by 226 and that is how much light this little flashlight of mine produces.  Almost enough to light up a whole city with enough light that everyone could read a book if it was pitch dark all around them.

With science so very much on the edge today, they took this Lumen thing one step farther.  They built this little “luminous emitter”, I’ll call it a bulb, so that it extracts any and all of the yellowish/orange color as seen in a candle flame which only lets pure white light emit.  Have you ever seen pure white light?  My eye can see detail like none other as this pure white light bounces off whatever I point it at in a darkened room.  And not only that, but clear across to the other side of this darkened room, through the far wall and into the next room.  Well, not quite, but I can visualize it.  I can hardly wait until we go camping tomorrow to try it out in a dark forest.  I’ll probably see Sasquatch and he will be putting his arm up over his eyes to block the light.

I’ll tell you science it something else these days.  New technology, new words to be made up, new definitions of these words and it goes on and on.  But I’ll tell you they are wrong about not being able to compare Lumens to Candle Power.  In fact I found a “factoid” where just a few short years ago (when I was much younger) flashlight makers have turned to several standards by which they rate their flashlights and one of the criteria is to show how their little emitter has to compare to candelas and right there it refers to candelas as candle power!  Check it out for yourself.  http://flashlightwiki.com/ANSI-NEMA_FL-1

Bears Butt

August 7, 2012