As a high school student, entrepreneur John Goscha invented his first product – adjustable weight golf clubs using silicon fibers and lightweight aluminum instead of titanium – in the family garage and formed his first company, Goscha Golf. In college, he came up with the concept for IdeaPaint (a roller-applied paint that transforms any smooth surface into a dry-erase surface), raised $15 million in venture capital, and won two Best of NeoCon awards in the Innovation and Wallcoverings categories.
Recently, Goscha turned his attention to the lighting industry and determined the reliance on LED, CFL, and incandescent/halogen technology to be narrowly focused. “I noticed other companies chasing LEDs and the government subsidies,” he states. “I don’t think people want to cringe when they turn on a light bulb,” he says, referencing the bluish cast that consumers associate with LED and even CFL. “I saw an opportunity to use a technology that could give the warm glow of an incandescent, and I didn’t use any government money to develop it.”
Goscha founded Lucidity Lights, Inc. and tapped the engineering expertise of industry veterans Victor Roberts, who spent 28 years at General Electric including heading up the lighting research department, and Walter Lapatovich, Ph.D., formerly a scientist with Osram Sylvania for 13 years. There are other savvy professionals involved on the company’s boards, such as Panasonic and Sylvania veteran Jakob Maya and reportedly Color Kinetics co-founder Ihor Lys.
After two years of testing, the team felt confident they had created an alternative to LED and CFL by applying induction technology for residential use. While induction technology has been around since the 1800s and used primarily in commercial applications, the team’s solution uses a copper coil instead of the more typical choice of tungsten filament or an electrode to generate light. With induction lighting, there is also a short warm-up before the lamp reaches full brightness.
Calling their solution Acandescent™ technology, the team named the product the Finally™ Light Bulb, with the goal of replicating the warm, omni-directional light of an incandescent for approximately $10 retail. Roberts serves as Finally Light Bulb’s Senior Technologist while Lapatovich is Director/Research & Advanced Development.
Lucidity appears to be the first company to harness induction lighting in this way and make it compact enough to be used in homes from a practical as well as aesthetic standpoint. There were also specific goals the team wanted to hit. “We wanted to nail 15,000 hours of life, we wanted the bulb to work with universal and incandescent dimmers, and we wanted it to reach 2700K in a few econds,” Goscha remarks. He credits the advances in the cell phone industry with providing small electronic parts that could be adapted to the Finally Light Bulb and without a huge cost. In addition, the Finally Light Bulb engineers had to invent new parts to suit this specific purpose. As with CFL, there is a small amount of mercury used in the product.
The Finally Light Bulb is currently under-going the Energy Star certification process and will be available in October through www.FinallyBulbs.com.
