EWM is an effective mechanism by which to get a short duration high intensity light source.  The peak intensity for copper wire, for example, is 9.6·10 candle power/cm. J.A. Anderson wrote in his initial spectrography studies that the light was comparable to a black body at 20,000 K. The advantage of a flash produced in this way is that it is easily reproducible with little variation in intensity. The linear nature of the wire allows for specifically shaped and angled light flashes and different types of wires can be used to produce different colors of light. The light source can be used in interferometry, flash photolysis, quantitative spectroscopy, and high-speed photography.