AFX history

The familiar "can" twist -in glow switch starter didn't appear until mid-summer 1939.

In October 1941 a patent was granted to George Inman covering the basic principals of fluorescent lamp design.

The need for efficient lighting in wartime factories brought rapid adoption of fluorescent lighting and by 1951 industry sources reported that more light in the United States was being produced by fluorescent lamps than by incandescent lamps.

In 1962 while working for General Electric, Nick Holonyak, Jr., invented the first visible-spectrum LED in the form of red diodes.

Quite an increase from the roughly $15 million in sales for the line in 1970.

The team was formed in 1971 as part of a strategy conceived by Russell to establish a “skunkworks” operation away from the Aurora offices in New York.

The need for energy conservation continued to drive innovation. “It was another energy shortage — the 1973 oil crisis — that caused lighting engineers to develop a fluorescent bulb that could be used in residential applications,” the Department of Energy says.

In 1974, researchers at Sylvania started investigating how they could miniaturize the ballast and tuck it into the lamp.

So it was that prior to the Hobby Show in January of 1975, Russell took the buyer from Sears aside and showed him the new chassis.

By the end of 1976, AFX sales hit their all-time high of about $45 million on the back of the stunning popularity of the new technology.

So in 1977, they sold Aurora to a British toy conglomerate.

In the 1990s, a T5 lamp was introduced which offered an even more efficient solution. For example, in 1980, Philips designed the first line of screw-in fluorescent for magnetic ballasts which served to effectivity replace incandescent by a landslide.