The science of seeing

Historical Significance: Matthew Luckiesh DSc, DE (1883 - 1967) was a physicist and was Director of General Electric's Lighting Research Laboratory at its Nela Park National Lamps Works facility in East Cleveland, Ohio where he pursued research on light and vision. In his day, he was known as the "Father of the Science of Seeing" at least in the world of illuminating engineering. He developed several theories on color and its physiological effect on people. He was also interested in determining the conditions under which optimal visibility was achieved, and in examining the relationship between light and seeing, in order to design better types of lamps. During World War I he studied camouflage, and later invented artificial sunlight and germicidal lamps. Luckiesh produced eleven U.S. patents, 28 books and about 860 scientific and technical articles, published between 1911 and 1960. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest "My name is pronounced as if it were spelled loo'kish. The u in the first syllable is the u in rude, and the second syllable rimes with dish." He devised the MAZDA Flametint Lamp, which was designed to create mood and to resemble the color of licking flames and the MAZDA Daylight Lamp, that had coiled tungsten filaments and transparent blue glass to produce high colour temperature daylight. In 1940, he and Frank Moss compared 5th and 6th grade students in well-lit classrooms to students in regular (poorly-lit) classrooms, and found significant increases in the scores on the New Stanford Achievement Test were demonstrated by the students in the well-lit classrooms, although the study may be flawed by confounding variables. Luckiesh also developed the 'Visibility Meter' with Frank Moss.