How can a flashlight be digital

That's like idiomatic screwdriver

How can a flashlight be analog? It's either on or it's off.

Eat your hearts out. Several years back, in order to stay ahead of my young charges at summer camp, I bought the world's coolest flashlight. It has no batteries. Instead, there is a heavy magnet in the shaft which one shakes up and down such that it passes through a coil to generate electricity which is stored in a capacitor. It has no bulb to burn out. Instead, it has a LED at the business end. What is most cool of all about it is that the little campers are so enamoured of the device that they beg me to allow them to do the shaking before I hike back up the trail at night to the chaplain's quarters. Is it digital? Who cares. It is cool!

> Is it digital?

What do you hold it with?

Digital has another meaning which in this millennium appears to have been forgotten. Of or relating to the finger or fingers. I have a digital flashlight, just about as big as my index finger. It takes one AA cell or perhaps on AAA cell and has an LED rather than a bulb, like Fr Steve's dynamo-driven light.

> Digital has another meaning which in this millennium appears to have been forgotten. Of or relating to the finger or fingers

or to put it another way: What do you hold it with?

Stumped me on that one. Crazy glue.

My aunt has a solar-powered flashlight.

My aunt has a solar-powered flashlight.

Your auntie is cool and would be a big hit if she were to come to camp with me this summer.

Take heart, Father Steve, I coming to camp with you in Seattle this summer for a week in July - along with one thousand other cavers. You wanna see lights? We'll show you lights. The National Speleological Society recommends that each caver carry three sources of lights - the best lights. Some hand held lights that we carry cost over $300.

Wow!

I couldn't hold a candle to you, Milum

you two are definitely a match!

Well, this thread is certainly illuminating.

at least no one is flaming it...

Back in the 1910s and 1920s, Victor Appleton wrote a series of books for boys which featured Tom Swift. In one of them, "Tom Swift and the Caves of Ice" I think it was, Tom uses a new invention in which some small batteries are placed in a tube with an electric bulb and a reflector and lens at one end. A switch then allows the user to turn the electric torch on and off. It was amazing. But a lot of that stuff was just science fiction, eh?

i have visited cave --improved ones like howe caverns (NY, in march of this year) and significantly less improved ones in various parts of pennsylvania
and i have visited mine musuems (in the actual mines, not above ground!) and visited old (colonial) iron mines (that dot NYstate--all this inspite of the fact that i am deadly afraid of the dark.

I'm not afraid of what passes for dark in NYC -even in the black out,there are car lights, lights powered by emergency generators (amazing how many of those there are!) and other light sourses. but real darkness.. (and underground caves are dark!)--so i know flashlights!

i always have a working flashlight (i check the batteries frequently) in my purse. and one in my car.. and 1 in every room of my apartment (bathroom, foyer and terrace included!)

at this point, some are color coordinated.. there is a perfectly matched purple flashlight in my foyer, and a blue one in dining room, and a bright yellow and black one in computer room (the walls are yellow there, but much of the electronic equipment (table lamp, shredder) is black or dark grey(computer/printer)--other rooms have more or less matching ones too, (the bathroom has a white one, my bedroom a blue one...)

some are the kind that have crummy bulbs, and take D cells, most are mag lights (or mini mags)-(and i have spare bulbs in the base of all of them!)

One of these days, i'll go back to having a super mini (1 AAA size battery to power) flashlight on my key ring.

most flashlights are powered direct current (batteries!) not on alternating current) and since most digital (computers, etal) equipment also runs on direct current it think i would call most flashlights digital. they are on or off, and while maglights do allow you to focus the beam, you can't, on them, or most flashlights adjust the light.(with a dial--a feature of analog equipment.

Post deleted by dalehileman

I have those in nearly all the rooms of my home. Very convenient since you never have to check the batteries. The light isn't the greatest but it is more than enough to illuminate the area while looking for the propane lamp.

A woman at the office was selling them for ten bucks a pop last December, so I bought one for everybody in my family - well one for each family.

I wrapped them up for Christmas and stood them up side-by-side beside the goodie bags of stuff I'd made up as prizes to be won for the games we play during the party.

A couple of the goodie bags were "pleasure-packs" which included those wooded massage wheels, loofa, aromatherapy foam bath, and um, personal lubricant. All stuff we manufacture at work.

Well, I'll let you folks imagine what people thought the long flashlights were after they'd seen the pleasure-pack goodie bags with personal lubricant.

It's revealing that we get 306 hits on "digital toothbrush"

revealing what?

Ted: By analogy, suggesting that "digital" might be coming to mean nothing more than "modern" or "up-to-the-minute"

As it is turning out, however, some of these flashlights do have features truly digital:

Hi Dale.
....We are a retailer of Vector's Digital Electronic Flashlight....is named so because it has a digital Liquid Crystal Display which shows both a numeric readout of run time remaining (eg 45 on the display for 45 minutes of battery power left) as well as a battery diagram with sectionals depicting remaining battery power, similar to what is found on most cell phones.
Neither the Halogen Main lamp, nor the LED area lights have anything to do with the flashlight being classified as "Digital"
Thank you for your time.

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I went caving about 15 years ago, and to my surprise we did not use any kind of battery-operated lights when we went into the caves. Instead, we had a flask-like metal tin that unscrewed into two parts. In the top part went about three cups of water. The bottom part we filled with pieces of "carburo" mineral (can't be bothered to look it up; I'm sure someone can give the name). The top bit leaked water very slowly onto the pieces, at which point a reaction took place that formed a gas. This tin hung from our belts, and there was a rubber pipe that connected it to a little open lamp at the front of our hard hats. All you needed to do was take a lighter to the lamp and voila, you had a flame to see by. The gas seemed to last forever, too.

We were told - but maybe this was just the instructors defending their setup - that flashlights could run out of batteries, but that with their carburo system, just by having a lighter you were sure of a light all the time.

These are called carbide lamps here. And when you run out of the carbide then all the water in the world won't give you light. They were very popular with miners a hundred years ago, and my mother had several of them flow through her antique business, all of them solid brass and still working.

The downside was they had an open flame and in a mine they would set off explosions of flammable gases or coal dust. My off the cuff guess is they are illegal in mines now.

>>>>We were told - but maybe this was just the instructors defending their setup - that flashlights could run out of batteries, but that with their carburo system, just by having a lighter you were sure of a light all the time. just by having a lighter you were sure of a light all the time.

They had a really odd way of justifying it. You can pretty much say the same thing about a flashlight; just by having a battery, you're sure of a light all the time too.

Lighters run out, as does carbide. If you can think about bringing one thing, you can think about others.

don't drop yer lighter. or wet it.

i dn't knw as id trst thse guys, persnly

Their reasoning seemed to be: carbide pieces last ages, and you often find water inside a cave, so if you have a lighter, you're all set.

Caving was a lot of fun for me. I do not suffer from claustrophobia and I'm slim enough that I could climb into galleries and not worry that I might get stuck further on, as some others did (worry, not get stuck, I mean ). Carbide or no carbide, it was a great experience.

I do not suffer from claustrophobia Ah, so you enjoy it, then?

I have nothing but admiration for cavers.I cannot stand enclosed spaces or being unable to easily get out - "Don't fence Me In!" or tie me down for that matter.
I have a pair of neato flashlights, one in car and one in bedroom night table. It has a sorta handle thingie that fits flat when not being used to wind up the LED light. Works great and no batteries .. which are pollutants if not disposed of properly. I've seen the shake-it-up flashlight advertised on TV. Glad to hear it really does work in real life.

Love it.