On Bicycle Lighting

The first in a number of items vainly intended to clarify the muddy waters of bicycle lighting terminology.

If you have a basic physics grounding and/or have researched buying a bike light lately you are probably a mite confused right now. All the manufacturers seem to rate their lights with different methods whether that is watts, candela, lumen or lux and it just muddies the water for the punter on the street.

To clarify my stance early on, I work for Amba-Marketing, the UK distributor for Busch & Muller and Supernova. I bought my first B&M light in the late 1990s (Thank you SJS Cycles) nearly a decade before I left the military and entered the bike world . Over the last 20 years I have used lights from B&M, Smart, Axa, BLT and Cateye for both battery and dynamo. I was given a B&M Ixon IQ by Amba the first winter they were on the market as a sales bonus/trial. I will not hide my respect of B&M's lights they have served me well on tours, club rides and some mostly unlit rural commutes. From my first halogen fuelled Oval to my current LED Oval+ with my trusty Seculite or D-Toplight depending on the bike, I'm now a kid in a sweetshop genuinely unsure what to replace the Oval with.  I do not put myself up as an expert and the text has evolved from a number of sources not just a C&P from Wiki.

You only have to visit a cycling forum to discover a variety of differing opinions on what light to have. The trouble is once you get past, “It says 300 million lumens and only cost me a tenner” what do you actually know? So in the first of a number of blogs on terminology todays subject is;

Candella

Scrubbing past the history, the current definition of Candella is,

The luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 x 10¹² hertz and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian.

Piece of cake? OK those Hertz and Watt figures. They give you a colour and intensity, which is roughly yellowish-green and is a color that the human eye is highly sensitive to.

Candella is a measurement of light at source, but neither it or Candlepower tells us how powerful the light is some distance away from the source. Instead, we measure the amount of light illuminating a surface area, which is called, naturally enough, the illuminance. The result is measured in lumens, with 1 lumen = 1 candela x steradian. For our purposes here we can think of the the latter term as an area, as the following example illustrates:

Imagine a transparent 1 metre radius sphere surrounding a candle. Its surface area will be given by 4 pi r², so the surface area of our sphere is:

4 pi 1² = 12.57 m²

The amount of energy passing through 1 square metre of the transparent sphere is 1 lumen, and so it follows that 1 candlepower is 12.57 lumens.

So in our bike light scenario the buyer has no idea where the candella has been measured or which direction the light is going or for that matter how many directions. So for our intents and purposes candella is fairly useless as it is a measurement of emitted luminous intensity and without knowledge of the emission cone meaningless.

Calm, there are more of these to come and much will become clear in time.