Abstract
WHEN motor cars pass each other at night time, there is often a blinding glare in the drivers' eyes. We learn from Science Service that, in the United States, the Bureau of Standards has been conducting an extended research on head-lights to discover how glare can be avoided. Dr. Dickinson of the Bureau of Standards concludes that the most important difficulty in obtaining safe head-lighting is the great disparity in brightness between beams from different lamps. One head-light beam is frequently ten times as intense as another. The driver with the dim lights experiences an almost complete lack of visibility when his car plunges into the bright light of the approaching car. Dr. Dickinson suggests that if the lights were kept so that no head-lamp was more than two or three times brighter than another, most of the glare problem would be solved. Most drivers rely on what they can see of the curb rather than what they see of the oncoming car. Hence the light is increased for a hundred feet in front of the car and the beam is widespread horizontally and slightly depressed. Few motorists realise that it is more dangerous to pass a car that is standing still than one that is running fairly fast. A driver in judging whether the road is clear relies on what he has seen during the past few seconds by the light of the oncoming car. But the road immediately at the back of a car at rest is not illuminated in this way and so danger may lurk there unseen. Exposed lights along the roads sometimes increase the risks of night driving. They often make objects almost invisible which could easily be seen by the head-lights alone.
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Motor Car Lights on the Road. Nature 131, 20 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131020a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131020a0