My school had plenty of pre-1980s fluorescent lights including those with big fat tubes. One of the kids found the flickering objectionable and it affected his reading. The head couldn't understand what all the fuss was about and called in an electrician. The electrician checked the lights and found there was nothing wrong with them. The tubes were then cleaned to remove the dust but that didn't improve things.
The kid claimed that blue tinted sunglasses improved his vision significantly, but the science teacher wouldn't take him seriously and the head didn't think that blue sunglasses was acceptable with school uniform.
Has anybody reading this had similar experiences with flicker from fluorescent lights? Old fashioned fluorescents flicker at 100Hz but modern fluorescents and low energy bulbs drive their tubes at a high frequency so don't flicker. My eyes are sensitive to the blueish-green glow of mercury street lights. They don't seem to exist in Britain nowadays but are common in the US. I encountered them somewhere in Surrey (Redhill?) in the early 80s and they were driving me insane.
Another related issue is flicker from CRTs. In the early 1990s there was some concern over video games causing seizures and fits. I read somewhere that older British TVs were more likely to cause seizures and fits than newer Japanese TVs. I'm not sure why. I suspected there could be a secondary flickering effect or another visual instability when some TVs were connected to a game console, but a few experiments with different TVs didn't reveal anything of the sort. A possible explanation was that a high proportion of game consoles were connected to old TVs. Anecdotal evidence from the early 1990s stated that old TVs often ended up in kid's bedrooms.
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