Daniel McFarlan Moore (February 27, 1869 – June 15, 1936) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. He developed a novel light source, the "Moore lamp", and a business that produced them in the early 1900s. The Moore lamp was the first commercially viable light-source based on gas discharges instead of incandescence; it was the predecessor to contemporary neon lighting and fluorescent lighting. In his later career Moore developed a miniature neon lamp that was extensively used in electronic displays, as well as vacuum tubes that were used in early television systems.
Early life
He was born in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, on February 27, 1869. Moore was the son of the Reverend Alexander Davis and Maria Louisa Douglas Moore. He graduated from Lehigh University in 1889. Moore married Mary Alice Elliott, of New York City, on June 5, 1895. They had three children: Dorothy Mae Moore (1900–1990), Elliott McFarlan Moore (1902–1933), and Beatrice Jean Moore (1912–2007).
Career
He began his career in 1890 working in the engineering department of the United Edison Manufacturing Company. Moore left in 1894 to form his own companies, the Moore Electric Company and the Moore Light Company.
The Moore lamp
thumb|right |1904 photograph illustrating interior lighting by the first installation of Moore tubes in a hardware store in Newark, New Jersey. |alt=A long, glowing glass tube rings the room and hangs a few feet down from the ceiling.
Moore had devised his glow discharge lighting system by 1896. The Moore lamps utilized nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the luminous gas; Moore's innovation compensated for the gradual loss of gas in the lamp to the electrodes and the glass. Carbon dioxide gave a good quality white light. The first commercial installation was done in 1904 in a hardware store in Newark, New Jersey. These were miniature lamps with a very different design than the much larger neon tubes used for neon lighting; a Smithsonian Institution website notes, "These small, low power devices use a physical principle called 'coronal discharge.' Moore mounted two electrodes close together in a bulb and added neon or argon gas. The electrodes would glow brightly in red or blue, depending on the gas, and the lamps lasted for years. Since the electrodes could take almost any shape imaginable, a popular application has been fanciful decorative lamps. Glow lamps found practical use as indicators in instrument panels and in many home appliances until the acceptance of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in the 1970s."
Moore was awarded the John Scott Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1911.
Death
On June 15, 1936, at the age of 67, Moore was shot to death on the lawn of his home in East Orange, New Jersey, by an unemployed inventor who became enraged after finding that an invention he filed for was already the subject of a patent granted to Moore.
Patents
- Electrical Light Display (1893)
- Phosphorescent Electrical Lighting (1898)
- Fire for Joints in Vacuum Tubes (1912)
- Gaseous-Conduction Lamp (1919)