Dr. Auer von Welsbach, the German scientist who had produced the Welsbach gas mantle, invented an incandescent electric lamp having a filament of the metal osmium. It was commercially introduced in Europe in 1905 and a few were sold, but it was never marketed in this country. It was generally made for 55 volts, two lamps to burn in series on 110-volt circuits, gave about 25 candlepower and had an initial efficiency of about 5½ lumens per watt. It had a very fair maintenance of candlepower during its life, having an average efficiency of about 5 l-p-w. Osmium is a very rare and expensive metal, usually found associated with platinum, and is therefore very difficult to obtain. Burnt out lamps were therefore bought back in order to obtain a supply of osmium. It is also a very brittle metal, so that the lamps were extremely fragile. [Illustration: OSMIUM LAMP, 1905. This incandescent lamp was used in Europe for a few years, but was impractical to manufacture in large quantities as osmium is rarer and more expensive than platinum.] THE GEM LAMP Dr. Willis R. Whitney, of Schenectady, N. Y., had invented an electrical resistance furnace. This consisted of a hollow carbon tube, packed in sand, through which a very heavy current could be passed. This heated the tube to a very high temperature, the sand preventing the tube from oxidizing, so that whatever was put inside the tube could be heated to a very high heat. Among his various experiments, he heated some carbon filaments and found that the high temperature changed their resistance “characteristic” from negative to positive. The ordinary carbon filament has a resistance when hot that is less than when it is cold, which was reversed after heating it to the high temperature Dr. Whitney was able to obtain. These filaments were made into lamps for 110-volt service and it was found that they could be operated at an efficiency of 4 lumens per watt. The lamps also blackened less than the regular carbon lamp throughout their life. [Illustration: GEM LAMP, 1905. This incandescent lamp had a graphitized carbon filament obtained by the heat of an electric furnace, so that it could be operated at 25 per cent higher efficiency than the regular carbon lamp. This lamp is in the exhibit of Edison lamps in the Smithsonian Institution.] This lamp was put on the market in 1905 and was called the Gem or metallized carbon filament lamp as such a carbon filament had a resistance characteristic similar to metals. At first it had two single hair pin filaments in series which in 1909 were changed to a single loop filament like the carbon lamp.