As they went into the next tune, Jerry [Garcia] had one in his left hand, and holds it up and says something like, 'I don't know what these are, but they're pretty fucking cool. But even some 50 years after their emergence, the question of how the glow stick reaction produces light is still not yet fully understood. Independence Day is a time to gather with friends and family, proudly displaying your patriotism and celebrating the spirit of freedom.

We spoke to a Bell Labs patent attorney who declined to do anything," he says, politely describing what amounts to a massive oversighton the part of his company's legal counsel. Though Chandross is the founding glowfather, you won't find his name on any US patents for the accessory.Before the crowd settled down, [Grateful Dead guitarist] Pigpen had one or two standing upright on several amplifiers. Edwin Chandross—a New Jersey resident, professional chemist, and the unwitting father of the most popular rave accessory in history: the glow stick. Especially when you consider that most of the substances that Deadheads were on made their way into rave culture as well. We had backpacks and shoulder bags filled up with light sticks—would have to be like 500 to 700 of them in total. After creating a test compound that lit up ever so faintly, it only took a few more revised experiments to reveal the active luminescence-producing combination.

Though glow sticks were long used as a military technology, some claim that the first public glow sticks debuted at a 1971 Grateful Dead show at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut. The best parts about these glowing bad boys is that they're disposable and resistant to water and pressure, which not only make them perfect for intoxicated partiers, but also for the military.

Though his experiments with luminol failed to yield the results he was looking for, it led him to discover that peroxalate esters provide the most important gateway to chemiluminescence. That required using two materials, and the important one turned out to be a volatile derivative of oxalic acid, the chloride. The user, Tommypea1953, was the son of a factory worker whose company was hired by American Cyanamid to create machines that assemble parts into finished glow sticks. It’s always good to stand out from the crowd, and what better way to do so that with glow sticks, glow bracelets and glow necklaces? Item specificsConditionNew: A brand-new, unused, unopened and undamaged item in original retail packaging (where packaging .