Posts Tagged ‘night goggles’

How were night goggles invented?

December 16th, 2009

Night goggles are the optical instruments enabling people to see in the darkness. Before inventing night goggles, people knew that some creatures living and hunting at night can capture more light and see better than human does. People knew these animals have different eye structures, but physiologically scientists could not arm human with the same eye system as animals’, so scientists started to think about electricity.

Electricity is easy to be amplified. When the lenses of night goggles capture the light from vicinity, the electronic system in the night goggles turn the dim light into electronic signals, then amplify the signals to much greater scale, and finally turn the boosted signals into light image. This new clearer image can be seen by the user of night goggles on the small screen of the night goggle.

The principium of changing the dim light entering the lenses of night goggles to electronic signals is pretty similar to the principium of solar panel, but the for former is more precise and more sensitive.

The image we see finally on the night goggles screen is of green color. Actually when the light image is boosted in the night goggle, the colors are in black and white. The green color is intentionally added to the new image as human eyes are more sensitive to the green light, so viewers can see better in green. Also looking at green images makes viewers feel easier for extended long time viewing.

Night goggle is now used in military forces and civilian areas, people finally realized the dream of seeing objects even in the pitch darkness.