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PHILIPS 18 Watts SL*18 Compact Fluorescent light bulb. One of the fist one-piece self ballasted compact fluorescent lamps. Offering energy savings of 75% and five-fold longer lifetime. Lamp consists of 12mm diamater tube folded into 3 large U-bends to form 4 parallel sections, with a glowbottle starter and bulky wirewound ballast in base. A prismatic glass jar refracts the light uniformly, and earned the SL its nickname as the lamp resembling a tin of beans - in both shape and weight! Although this lamp is technologically a great milestone, it is easy to see why it was slow to penetrate the market. Most notable is its great weight - owing to the conventional magnetic ballast inside, the mass of the lamp is m ore than half a kilogram and this was prone to make many table and standard lamps top heavy and quite unstable. The larger dimesnions meannts that it wouldn't fit into small shades, and the run-up time of almost 5 minutes also proved unacceptable. (taken from www.lamptech.co.uk)

Bulb used in donor's bathroom from 1985-1999