As a child, most of us were curious to watch fireflies at summer nights. “Those are cool bugs!” as my son put it. But did you know the fireflies actually had something to do with the invention of glowsticks?

We know glow sticks use chemical reaction to emit light. Noticing that unlike most light-emitting devices such as light bulbs, matches and candles, glow sticks do not seem to generate heat while emitting light.

Same thing with fireflies (also known as lightning bugs), they produce light through a chemical process in their body called bioluminescence to attract mates. And this light is known as “cold light” because it emits almost no heat.

In the 1960s, scientists started researching on producing light without generating heat, basically to imitate fireflies. Then in 1962, a young chemist named Edwin A. Chandross at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, discovered the substances that when mixed together produced chemical light without generating heat. Even though the reaction efficiency was quite low, it has laid the foundation for modern chemiluminescent technology – glowsticks.