Some incandescent technology might come down the
pike to produce light efficiently - isn't the sulphur lamp
an incandescent lamp?

There are various technologies to improve the efficiency of
incandescent, I'm sure something better will come along
eventually.

Not likely. The only way (I know of) to improve the efficiency of
incandescent lamps is to raise the temperature. Tungsten-halogen lamps seem
to represent the limit for consumer lighting.

CFLs are the first step in moving to LED lighting.


The sulphur lamp has been discontinued. It isn't incandescent
anyway, it used a magnetron to excite sulphur inside a globe,
it was noisy, not very scaleable, and the light apparently was
greenish, though I never saw one in operation.

The sulphur lamp was, indeed, incandescent, not fluorescent. (You can't
produce visible light by exciting atoms at microwave frequencies.)

There was talk of such applications as using a single sulphur lamp to
provide all illumination functions in a car (including the headlights) via
fiber optics. Ignoring the complexity of such a system (how do you shut off
the light where it isn't needed?), the failure of the sulphur lamp would
leave you without any illumination. Not a good idea on a dark road.