Ancient Web: Jim Watters Turned AOL CDs Into a Fluorescent Lamp

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Remember when companies kept mailing people compact discs containing Internet software? Jim Watters looked at the resulting pile of plastic and saw not a waste problem but a light fixture.

Visit Watters's original CD Lamp page.

The idea started at a previous workplace. Watters had noticed sunlight glowing through stacks of discarded CDs and liked the strange green light they produced. He began saving unwanted promotional discs and the failed CD-Rs people then called coasters. After about three years he had roughly seventy.

He wanted to place a tubular lamp inside the stack without overheating the plastic. The original project narrative follows his selection of a compact fluorescent utility light and the unexpectedly difficult business of fitting discs over it. Different brands behaved differently when their center holes were enlarged: some ground cleanly, others softened and melted.

A project log that admits what went wrong

Watters documented the lamp with step-by-step photographs. The CD stack was separated with small business-card-sized discs, and the base was carved from plywood to hide the power supply and switch. The narrative includes a broken switch, discs squeezed too close together, and improvised methods for making the base round without a lathe.

The result was a glowing cylinder of transparent and reflective material, complete with an old gold-colored disc at either end. It was hardly an anonymous mass-produced decoration. The reader can see what its maker tried, regretted and changed.

At the end, Watters suggests using a different kind of bulb or running the unit directly from an AC supply. He then links CD Lamp 2 and a third design arranged like piano keys. Those follow-ups make the original page a record of iterative experimentation rather than a frozen list of instructions.

The page also links Neil Fraser's AOL-disc lamp and a German CD-lamp project, showing a little early-web circuit of makers comparing solutions. Its footer says last modified December 27, 2014, although the visible page does not establish the original construction year.

Old electrical experiments should not be copied without modern safety checks, especially when plastic, heat and wiring meet. As an archive, though, the project beautifully preserves the era when free discs were everywhere and a personal website was the natural place to document what you built from them.

Browse the photographs and Watters's later lamp versions.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.