Headlamp
lamp mounted in the front of a vehicle
A headlamp is a lamp attached to the front of a vehicle to illuminate the road ahead. Headlamps are also often called headlights, but in United States usage, headlamp is the term for the device itself and headlight is the term for the beam of light produced and distributed by the device.
Headlamp performance has steadily improved throughout the automobile age, spurred by the great disparity between daytime and nighttime traffic fatalities: the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that nearly half of all traffic-related fatalities occur in the dark, despite only 25% of traffic travelling during darkness.
Other vehicles, such as trains and aircraft, are required to have headlamps. Bicycle headlamps are often used on bicycles, and are required in some jurisdictions. They can be powered by a battery or a small generator like a bottle dynamo or hub dynamo.
History of automotive headlamps
Origins
The first horseless carriages used carriage lamps, which proved unsuitable for travel at speed. The earliest lights used candles as the most common type of fuel. Some carriages used oil lamp and Kerosene lamp for lighting.
Mechanics
Acetylene Gas headlamp
The earliest headlamps, fuelled by combustible gas such as acetylene gas or oil, operated from the late 1880s.
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This entry incorporates text from “Headlamp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.