Once upon a time ... the diffusing disk
04/21/2024
Isn't it outrageous that eye clinics still charge several thousand francs for corneal lasering? You can get it for free on any highway these days! You just have to wait until a modern vehicle with LED headlights comes along at night.
Okay, back to seriousness for a moment. Matrix headlights, which use intelligent traffic recognition and automatic cut-off to increase visibility without dazzling other road users, are all the rage these days. Thousands of small mirrors and countless servomotors in the headlights do their utmost to ensure that the light only reaches the right places. With enormous technical effort, attempts are being made to get to grips with a problem that was solved 70 years ago with a simple ground pane of glass.
The good old lens always directed the headlights of your own car a little to the right so that you could see as far as possible in your own lane and dazzle oncoming traffic as little as possible. Due to the fixed glass - apart from the height adjustment for different loads - there was only one fixed direction for the light. The expected glare for every road user was therefore predictable and reliably foreseeable.
Of course, this meant that the illumination of the road was not always 100 percent perfect. But then you simply adapted the speed to the visibility conditions - and not the other way around. The biggest disadvantage of the asymmetrical lens was therefore purely aesthetic. From then on, the headlights no longer looked as artistic as the 1918 Paige Model 6-55 above, but always squinted a little to one side.
