Flashlights to Keep Your Family Safe

November 03, 2011, By Michael O. Varhola 2 comments

Michael O. Varhola

You can never have too many flashlights. That was probably always my line of thought, even though general-purpose electric torches have been the norm for most of my life. But with modern breakthroughs in bulb technology and the current availability of so many different specialized flashlights, there are more opportunities than ever before to hone and expand your flashlight arsenal.

While I was growing up and serving in the military, most of my friends and I carried OD green, military-specification, angle-head or straight-line flashlights that ran on D-cell batteries. Other than being made out of plastic rather than metal, these were fundamentally identical to the flashlights that GIs had carried during World War II. They were equipped with metal clips that allowed us to hang them from our gear and came with a number of colored-lens filters for use under different conditions; red and diffusion were standard, but there were also amber, blue, green and blackout versions.

Maglite flashlights were the natural upgrade to the cheaper military-style flashlights and were considerably more rugged and could even double as a club if you needed one (which made them traditionally very popular with cops). Just a few models of this flashlight were readily available for many years, and the standard models used either two or three D-cell batteries and were made of black anodized aluminum. I still keep one of these flashlights in my car and have no reason to replace it anytime soon. Mini Maglites in various sizes, powered by AA and AAA batteries, smaller versions of the full-sized Maglites, can be conveniently carried in a pocket or backpack, and I have acquired any number of these over the years and like to keep one handy. 

I have also tried any number of other models over the years and used them in my home, car or the field. All those flashlights, however, use technology that has changed little since the era of Thomas Edison and, as with many devices, there have been significant recent improvements. One of these is the perfection of LED (light-emitted diode) bulbs, the best of which can shed better light using less energy than a conventional bulb.