Light chimneys

(This is my first day and I haven't had a chance to cross-check this, so easy on the ibids, please. I got rather unfairly chastised for my earlier effort...)

This is an architectural basic built into every new house, block of flats, office, school and so on. It is the love-child of the common or garden skylight and the fibre-optic...

For years people have been banging on about the benefits of natural light; S.A.D this, vitamin D that, rickets the other, sunshiney bonhomie, la la la... So the light chimney is a structure which brings a concentration of natural light into the heart of a large building which cannot be reached by the stuff coming in the windows. Now, before I hand it over to that science guy for humane destruction by use of the Greek alphabet and squiggles, I'll give the bare bones. The output, or "hearth", is a one metre by two metre flat flourescent surface on an inner wall. It is fed by a series of solid glass tubes (obviously with highly-mirrored internal surfaces) leading up to the top of the building - hence the "chimney" name. Now, instead of these tubes just ending in a gaping hole at the top, they are led upwards and sheared off into the largest possible flat surface areas. In my head, the total rooftop surface area needs to be - and this could feasibly be achieved - around six times that of the "hearth". (The tops or - "pots" if we want an appropriate simile-cum-anagram - could even become an intriguing artistic feature: "Have you seen Lalique's latest range of light-chimney pots, Agnes? My dear, they're quite something! Alan wants to pick some up from Walmart when he goes there to buy the kids their new rifles, but I won't have it. He's SO mean!") Thus the hearth light is "concentrated" natural light and is consequently brighter than outside. Something we'd enjoy here in London. The tops could be cleaned with a broom by a little chap in grubby Victorian clothing. Possibly singing songs in masacred Cockney. There you go, I've revived an industry.

A subsidiary idea is that this site should allow us to upload doodles in MS paint or such like. I'm sure daft little drawings would add to our work. Maybe one of the programmer geeks can give us that as a late Crimbo present?