
The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy - rbanffy
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
======
klondike_
Planned Obsolescence is largely a myth, besides a few blatant examples. There
are a few factors that drive consumer perception of planned obsolescence

-Demand for cheaper products: Consumers tend to prefer cheaper products. This means cheaper materials and a product that doesn't last as long. Common household appliances cost much less than they did in the earlier half of the 20th century, and people act surprised when they don't last as long as an appliance from the 1950s that cost more than twice as much

-Survivor bias: Only durable products from the past survived, broken and unrepairable products were sent to the landfill. Therefore people only see the most durable products of the past and assume everything made back then was just as durable.

-Technical obsolescence: Old products become less useful as technology progresses. Why use a 100 year old still functional device when it is inefficient and technologically obsolete?

The article even mentions some of these factors with regards to the so-called
planned obsolescence of light bulbs. Longer lasting bulbs are dimmer and less
efficient, so it makes sense to design them in such a way to maximize light
output over a certain timespan.

~~~
KozmoNau7
But at least you _could_ buy devices that would last for decades and decades.

Try finding a washing machine these days, that will last for more than 5 years
or so before something breaks and renders the machine useless.

You may be able to find an industrial machine, made for hotels or laundries.
But it will be very expensive and likely be huge and it will need 3-phase
power. It will also likely not have a spin cycle, so you'll have to either air
dry your clothes for ages or buy a separate clothes spinner (most driers need
the clothes to have been spin dried first).

Whether I buy a cheap Whirlpool or an expensive Miele/AEG/Bosch or whatever,
the quality and longevity is universally shit.

~~~
chrisbennet
I’m keeping my old washer and dryer for that reason.

“They Used To Last 50 Years”

[https://medium.com/@ryanfinlay/they-used-to-
last-50-years-c3...](https://medium.com/@ryanfinlay/they-used-to-
last-50-years-c3383ff28a8e)

~~~
w0m
That riles me up, it's comparing ~2500usd (adjusted) appliances with ~200usd
appliances while glossing over actual cost to consumer or equivalent priced
_quality_.

~~~
chrisbennet
We bought our washer and drier used/refurbished in 1991. I finally replaced
the one of them [with another used one] a couple of years ago.

------
ppod
Thomas Pynchon integrated this story into Gravity's Rainbow. There are some
amazing passages imagining the fortunes of Byron, a sentient bulb who is
determined to escape his own mortality --- the planned obsolescence of
Phoebus:

" Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human
one, known as “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in
Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated
Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%,
respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Pheobus fixes the
prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world,
from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of
the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great
Combination). Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace for
a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.

But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out his career
at an all-girl opium den in Charlottenburg, almost within sight of the statue
of Wernher Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs witness the
more languorous forms of Republican decadence. He gets to know all the bulbs
in the place, Benito the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an
escape, Bernie down the hall in the toilet, who has all kinds of urolagnia
jokes to tell, his mother Brenda in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush
puppies, dildos rigged to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries
of the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the night, reaches into
the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum floors after days
without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural state… "

full excerpts here:

[http://lukedanger.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/story-of-byron-
bulb...](http://lukedanger.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/story-of-byron-bulb.html)

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Did people of that time have more respect (fear or faith) for corporations?

~~~
toomanybeersies
I suspect that it was more a lack of knowledge. Before the internet it
would've been a lot harder for knowledge of these cartels to spread.

It was based in Switzerland, how was the average American going to find out
about it? Even if they wanted to, where would they look?

~~~
Gibbon1
Based on conversations with my grandmother who was born at the turn of the
century, knowledge of how malign corporations will act when given a chance was
something that was forgotten/intentionally buried.

------
GuB-42
While most people forget to mention when discussing the Phoebus cartel is that
with incandescent lightbulbs, lifespan and efficiency are inversely
correlated.

It is actually quite simple: incandescent lightbulbs are blackbody radiators.
Efficiency depends only on the temperature of the filament, the hotter the
better, but lifespan decreases drastically as temperature increases.

There isn't much that can be done in an incandescent light bulb. The filament
is tungsten, voltage is fixed by the grid, power is the rated power. So, the
only choice is to make the filament longer/thinker or shorter/thinner. The
former will be dimmer and longer lasting compared to the latter.

Requiring a set lifespan also ensures consistent brightness and color
temperature (a real temperature in this case), it also requires reasonably
precise manufacturing. These are generally good things.

Well obviously, a lot of it is motivated by profit, but there are also very
good technical reasons behind it too.

The situation today with LED lighting is actually much worse. LEDs could last
a lifetime, unlike with incandescent light bulbs, there is no reason for them
to burn. However, a lot of them fail because they are under-engineered.

------
timcederman
In 2007, Google gifted their employees one of the latest in LED light bulbs,
"just because". I remember LED bulbs being very rare at the time, and we ended
up with two of them somehow.

1 failed within 6 months, the other is still used daily as a bedside lamp 11
years later.

~~~
dingaling
I have had the same experience with LEDs. If they make it past the first few
months they'll keep running for years. I assume it's a QA issue.

~~~
taeric
Probably more a power quality issue. It is amazing how inconsistent the flow
of power is in most people's homes. In large because it didn't need to be
consistent in the past.

------
PeterStuer
Slightly OT: In winter, when you are heating the rooms anyway and so any heat
produced is useful, not wasted, is an 'old' incandescent light-bulb still
significantly less energy efficient then a 'modern' energy saver bulb?

~~~
abainbridge
Yes because you could heat the room with gas heating, which is about 3x
cheaper. And if you are in an area that uses a lot of gas/coal in the electric
generation, then you will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.

Or you could run a heat pump, that wins about a factor of 5.

I learned this from this excellent resource:
[https://www.withouthotair.com/](https://www.withouthotair.com/)

There's an argument that

~~~
PeterStuer
So you're saying 'it depends' on the differential in methods for producing
electricity versus your other heating sources, which makes sense. If I have a
solar roof for the electricity, vs an oil from fracking powered heating
solution, then the lightbulb's 'waste' heat would certainly be preferable.

Part of the reason for asking in the first place is because I'm quite
sensitive to the light quality as produced by an incandescent bulb, preferring
it vastly over even the most 'modern' 'energy saver' bulbs.

~~~
abainbridge
Yes. And I think there's some benefit to the planet from incandescent bulbs
being a simple and cheap technology to manufacture (although I have no
justification for this belief).

Anyhow, I agree about incandescent bulbs being nice. I never found a CFL I was
happy with. The Philips LED bulbs are very good though:
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-Bayonet-Light-Bulb-
Frosted/...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-Bayonet-Light-Bulb-
Frosted/dp/B01KHILBIE)

They don't flicker (and I'm someone infuriated by PWM'd lights on modern
cars). They achieve full brightness instantly. The colour temperature and
spectral rendering index is good. They are much more reliable than some
similar unbranded bulbs I've seen (about 15 such bulbs were installed in my
kitchen area at work. They fail at a rate of about one per month, in a manor
consistent with this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Pemtc3Uhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Pemtc3Uhw)).

They do cost £9 for two though. They'll need to run for about 500 hours to pay
for themselves (vs incandescent). I reckon the first one I bought has run for
about 2500 hours by now.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
The older Philips LED bulbs were very high quality. Dimmable, no flicker,
power factor corrected. Here's a youtube teardown.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWKAub54sLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWKAub54sLU)
Compare the internal circuitry with the youtube video you linked to. Yours
were a cheaper design. No wonder the bulbs failed so quickly.

Nowadays Philips seem to be selling both a higher quality and a lower quality
bulb in each wattage.

To me the purchase price isn't an issue. I have a few places where I run bulbs
15 or 20 hrs a day. So moving from 60 W to 10 W in those locations made an
incredible cost savings. Where I am in the USA, a 1 W load on continuously
costs $1/yr. So saving 50 W in a location that's on about 80% of the time
saves me $40/yr in electricity. For just one bulb.

------
r00fus
What's with the scary hedge at LED dominance?

"Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an
open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate.
There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their
rated lifetimes were reached. "

Other than warmth, my home LEDs (all of them - Cree) have lasted 7 years and
look to last about 10-15 more. They've already paid for themselves as before
that I was replacing 4-5 bulbs a year and wasting 10x the wattage.

~~~
tjohns
My Philips Hue LED bulbs have been very reliable.

On the other hand, some cheap no-name chinese LED lamps I got off Amazon
started failing after less than a year.

There definitely are some bad, short-life LED bulbs out there -- especially on
the lower end of the market.

~~~
Turing_Machine
There's a Philips LED (one of the weird looking three-lobed ones) that has
been burning continuously in the entryway of my inlaws' house for over seven
years. It's a 60W equivalent. I bought it for them because a) the light burns
all the time (even in daylight that area is dark) and b) it's a pain in the
butt to change.

I think it was about $45 when I bought it. A similar model is down to $21 for
a 100W equivalent now.

I've got several other Philips bulbs of that type that have been in use for a
long time, though not quite that long.

I've never had one go out.

As with you, I've had numerous cheapies go out over the same interval.

~~~
wlesieutre
That sounds like the bulb that Philips won the L Prize with:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Prize#/media/File:Philips_LE...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Prize#/media/File:Philips_LED_bulbs.jpg)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yep, that's the one.

It produces good-quality light, too, despite what you'd think from the yellow
shell color.

------
sevensor
I suppose this is what happened with CF bulbs? We were promised longer bulb
life, but in practice I find that I have to change CF bulbs far more often
than traditional fluorescent tubes. It's going to take quite some engineering
to develop LEDs that burn out fast enough.

~~~
Johnny555
I think a lot of CFL lifetime depends on the quality of your electricity. In
my last place, I had some that lasted 8 years including some high-usage lights
like in the livingroom that saw at least 3 - 5 hours of daily use.

Though I always purchased name-brand bulbs, never the cheap generic brands.

I left them all behind when I moved so those are the longest lived ones I have
experience with, in my new house, I have mostly LED's with a few CFL's and
they're up to around 5 years old... I like the light from LED's better or I'd
have more CFL's around.

Failures have been rare, but I have pretty clean power, few power outages and
practically no thunderstorms in the area.

~~~
jdmichal
Interestingly enough, in one apartment I had a particular fixture that would
burn out incandescent bulbs extremely quickly. I put in a CFL and never had to
replace it again. No idea what was going on there.

------
CapitalistCartr
Past discussions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12107932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12107932)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369136)

------
fjfaase
About 36 years ago, my parents bought some first generation energy saving
lamps. One of them is still in use above her dinner table.

------
whoisjuan
Well, there's a lightbulb in Livermore, California that has been burning for
more than a 100 years:
[http://www.centennialbulb.org/](http://www.centennialbulb.org/)

~~~
russdill
There's a tradeoff between efficiency and life. My electric oven makes a
decent light when turned on high. I bet it'd burn for a lot longer than 100
years.

~~~
sevensor
Fun story, I've seen an oven element burn out. It arced through the floor of
the oven, leaving a hole I could stick my finger through and almost started a
house fire.

~~~
IntronExon
That’s absolutely terrifying! Was it a very old or poorly maintained oven?
Please say yes...

~~~
sevensor
Both. It was in a rented apartment. My best guess is that decades of heat
cycling had caused the filament to sag.

~~~
MertsA
It probably wasn't sagging that killed it. Over time those elements will
develop hot spots and eventually the hot spot fails spectacularly spewing
sparks and plasma from the failure. It's kind of similar to a plasma cutter
for a second as there's the small arc in the element which ionizes the gas and
it blows it out from the element and if it hits something grounded I can
totally see it punching a hole through sheet metal.

[https://youtu.be/EC_6urfu5UI?t=7m40s](https://youtu.be/EC_6urfu5UI?t=7m40s)

~~~
sevensor
Interesting. I'd totally buy that explanation.

------
leggomylibro
Ooh fun, the Phoebas Cartel. The New Yorker also ran a piece which touched on
this a little while back:

[https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-
quanda...](https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quandary-why-
theres-no-such-thing-as-built-to-last)

------
realandreskytt
They did bring about an universal socket, though. That’s quite a benefit

~~~
caf
There are, of course, two competing commonly-used sockets:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_screw)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonet_mount](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonet_mount)

~~~
stevekemp
I'm from the UK, and I'm all too familiar with the two-types of bulbs.

But a couple of years ago I moved to Finland, and it seems here that the
Edison-screw won. I've not seen a single bayonet mount since I've moved here.
(And I've moved flat a few times. When you rent a flat they are typically
unfurnished, and the Finns take this to an extreme, removing all their light-
bulbs along with the furniture.)

~~~
pluma
Situation in Germany is pretty similar. I've never seen a bayonet mount in my
life, I think. Also our flats don't come with lightbulbs either.

Every German who has moved flats a couple of times thus owns a few barebone
lamp socket assemblies which are affectionately called "Russian chandeliers"
(with apologies to Russians). When moving in these are usually the first
things to go up until proper lamps are installed.

EDIT: I think I've seen bayonet mounts in some antique furniture at my grand
parents' house as a child. But it certainly strikes me as a bit of an
anachronism, much like American farmhouse style windows (the kind you slide
up) compared to tilt turn windows (which are the norm in my country).

------
sgillen
I’m very amused by the fact that it took serious engineering effort to
manufacture bulbs that were reliable during their lifetime but that would also
burn out quickly.

~~~
Gibbon1
Interesting thing I learned was before WWII you could buy cold cathode light
fixtures and get the local neon shop to make a lamp for it. Cold cathode lamps
will last 20 years.

The light bulb manufacturers got those outlawed via the national electrical
code. It's illegal to have any wiring in a residence over 1000. Except for
radio's televisions and microwaves. Which means cold cathode lighting is
outlawed. Cold cathode is basically just neon, which is similar to fluorescent
except unlike fluorescent you don't have a hot filament to burn out. Both
requires higher voltage to operate and results somewhat lower efficiency, but
with 100,000 hour life span.

Later in the 1970's they also made sure that fluorescent lamps efficiency
standards mandated high color temperature (blue) phosphors. In low light
residential use high color temp makes everything looks like ass.

~~~
chopin
You may be right but it should be considered that high voltages can cause
x-rays in the right conditions. There could be a rationale behind it...

~~~
Gibbon1
Cold cathode tops out at a few thousand volts.

------
linkmotif
There is a great movie by the same name:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Hlf6nLvV4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Hlf6nLvV4).
There is a part where they interview a journalist in Ghana (I think) who
researches the electronic dumping in his country. It’s haunting.

------
hindsightbias
After replacing CFLs time and time again, a wise man at the hardware store
told me to buy Verilux.

Haven't needed a ladder in 5 years.

~~~
copperx
They look like they're the same price as mid-end LEDs.

------
augustk
Not providing software updates is also a kind of planned obsolescence of
computers. Luckily, we have free software operating systems which can extend
the lifetime of computers. The fact that software is getting more and more
inefficient isn't exactly helping either.

~~~
yoz-y
I honestly do not think that any developer I know would be okay if they were
told "write it in a way so it will stop working in a year". Maintaining old
software is expensive and people do not want to pay. It is also way easier to
just pull everybody with you to latest release (which is why there are so many
subscriptions now).

edit: also, I do know a lot of developers that would not be happy to work on
the maintenance of some old software.

------
acd
The Phoebus Cartel controlled the life time of light bulbs. The cartel agreed
that the life time of a light bulb would be 1000 hours. Famous companies such
as Osram and Philips where part of the cartel.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel)

One can learn from the light bulb conspiracy that planned obsolescence is
real. It is profitable unless they are caught for companies to make products
with a limited life thus they can sell replacement products and bad for the
environment.

------
c8d3f7b49897918
I would be interested in an economy that incentivized repair rather than
replacement. Maybe make repairs tax-free or even a tax credit.

~~~
mc32
Poor economies (think underdeveloped economies) do incentivize repair over
replacement. Cases in point, cars in Cuba, Former USSR republics, etc. You
will also find repairshops for electronics in many developing economies as
well. Labor to repair a unit makes a repair affordable whereas buying a new
unit might be prohibitive.

In developed nations, labor is too expensive to make a repair worthwhile for
things people can regularly afford. It's only as things become expensive that
repairing something makes economic sense (a $100 replacement screen for a
phone is economically viable vs buying a new $600 phone). Conversely very few
people in the US for example would think of repairing an old Microwave when
buying a new one is only marginally more expensive than getting a new one.

~~~
namdnay
Indeed, a good example of that is the fact that people export very old used
cars from Europe to Africa, because due to the much lower cost of repair their
value in Africa is higher than their value in Europe (nil), enough to make it
worth the shipping!

------
citizenpaul
Wait Until the truth about the medical industry comes out in 40-80 years.

~~~
buserror
Too bad this ^^ was downvoted, because the big pharma has exactly the same
incentives as the rest of the big corps at generating money. And they aren't
'nicer' than car or light bulbs companies.

You know, remember the tobacco industry, when they were claiming it made your
teeth cleaner, your breath fresher and and that jazz? It's not that long ago.

