The original development plan was to contract with one or 

 more of the larger lamp manufacturers for the development 

 of the light sources. Representatives of the General Electric 

 Co., Westinghouse Corp., and Sylvania Products were 

 consulted in turn and the problem explained. None of the 

 potential contractors had a suitable lamp nor did they wish 

 to undertake the development of one, primarily because of 

 small demand. In addition to the companies, the Bureau of 

 Ships, Code 644, was contacted. The Bureau indicated that 

 it could not help in certain specific areas, particularly with 

 regard to the extreme pressure requirement. The Bureau 

 did, however, provide one lamp casing for shallower depths. 

 The tests conducted on the BUSHIPS casing are described 

 in a subsequent section. 



During the course of the investigations, PEK Laboratories, 

 Palo Alto, California, indicated its willingness to undertake 

 the development of a lamp to meet the bathyscaph requirements, 

 While the lamp under development by this contractor shows 

 promise, the company itself is too small to carry out a rapid 

 program. Although two models have thus far been tested, 

 the lamp is still some distance from completion. 



The delay involved in awaiting production of a suitable lamp 

 by PEK Laboratories or some other supplier led to develop- 

 ment of an interim lamp at the Navy Electronics Laboratory. 

 The development program and the resulting equipment are 

 described in the following section. 



NEL (AKIN) LAMP 



Since PEK Laboratories in its lamp development program was 

 approaching the pressure problem by making the lamp 

 envelope itself strong enough to resist the pressure of the 

 deep ocean, it was decided to attack the problem at NEL 

 from another angle. By using a pressure-resistant casing, 

 a lamp that would be readily available as an "off-the-shelf" 

 item could be used. 



The first step then was to find a suitable lamp and design 

 a pressure casing around it. The most promising was a 

 relatively new 150-watt, 24-volt incandescent lamp developed 

 by the General Electric Co., Cleveland, Ohio. The lamp 

 uses a mixture of iodine and argon gases which causes the 

 tungsten, which evaporates from the filament, to redeposit 



