
The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014) - mmastrac
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
======
frik
Removing light bulbs from retail market and enforcing mercury based CFLs -
that was the latest act of such a cartel. Good the the paradigm shift to LED
was quicker and different then they hoped. Now Philips, GE and OSRAM are a
shadow of its former self, and little players in the LED industry. And Asian
build LED are of a often of a higher quality and last longer. (well probably
all LEDs are built there anyway, even the one from OSRAM that whats to sell
that part of the company) And Asian built traditional light bulb are available
and last longer than the older cartel build bulbs.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _And Asian build LED are of a often of a higher quality and last longer._

I'd like to believe that. I got burned by so many cheap Chinese LEDs (quite
literally, too - some common failure modes of LED bulbs have them getting
almost as hot as incandescent ones) that now I'm willing to pay premium to be
sure the bulb won't turn into disco stroboscope after two days of usage.

------
bcoates
Planned obsolescence would be changing the base on the lamp every few years so
that people would have to buy new fixtures when they can't buy replacement
bulbs anymore. Author is not using that term correctly.

The actually interesting story is about the market failure where customers
have no choice but to prefer the thing they can measure (bulb life vs cost)
over the more important thing they can't measure (electricity cost over life
of bulb).

~~~
whoopdedo
> Planned obsolescence would be changing the base on the lamp every few years
> so that people would have to buy new fixtures when they can't buy
> replacement bulbs anymore.

Have you bought a light fixture recently? That sounds like the new state of
affairs. Aided by government regulations that require new lamps not be able to
accept older "inefficient" bulbs, there's been an explosion in the variety of
sockets.

I've converted every lamp in my apartment to LED except for one, because it
uses a GU24 base that is very difficult to find in anything other than CFL.

~~~
superuser2
Which government? I have not seen this in the US, and I purchased quite a few
lamps in the last couple of years.

If it happens here I'll be extremely sad. CFLs and LEDs have an extremely
strong negative effect on mood for me. Fortunately I can still buy halogens,
which aren't quite as cozy but suffice.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
Sounds like you react to bad LEDs. Good ones have stable power supplies that
don't ripple, and phosphor coatings that produce fairly even frequency
distributions. LEDs for room lighting are still relatively immature, but
they're getting there quite quickly.

------
ffk
The longest running light bulb is in Livermore, CA and has been running since
1901. It's installed and maintained in a fire station.

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

~~~
aaron695
Obviously an environmental disaster if everyone had these.

But still, a quaint thing.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
From the Wikipedia article

> The Centennial Light was originally a 30-watt or 60-watt bulb

Why? Everyone, where I'm from anyway, now has CFLs and LEDs, mostly, and the
environmental disaster rolls on.

------
russdill
Don't forget though that there really is a direct correlation between
efficiency, brightness, and lifetime. Your electric stove makes a great long
lasting light. Just turn all 4 burns on full. It will last virtually forever.

~~~
Neil44
Yes it's not such an immoral decision as it is presented. Light bulbs that
have energy consumption in the KW range because people want them to last
forever would not be good.

------
fastaguy88
What I would like to know is, how did Thomas Pynchon know about this when he
wrote Gravity's Rainbow in the early 1970's? Research pre-internet.

[http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/07/planned-
obsole...](http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/07/planned-
obsolescence/)

------
ars
> Of course, given the collective ingenuity of the cartel’s engineers and
> scientists, it should have been possible to design a lightbulb that was both
> bright and long-lived.

And not energy efficient.

The article lightly touches on it, but the physical reality is that the better
the electrical efficiency the less time the bulb lasts.

It's a tradeoff that has not changed in 100 years.

So yes, the cartel did mandate 1,000 hours - but they also saved untold
amounts of electricity over then next 100 years.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Seems like an important point, but I think it would also be worth to see a
comparison of energy saved by end users through increased efficiency, and
energy used on additional manufacturing, distribution and sales caused by the
need to replace bulbs more often.

This is a general point about all "eco" technologies too - a device is not
"eco-friendly" if it's _total_ manufacturing and distribution energy costs are
higher than the "eco-unfriendly" alternative.

~~~
yuubi
Conveniently, the retail price includes the direct expenditures on energy to
make and transport the item to the store.

I recall the electricity rate being around 0.08 USD/kWh around here a while
back, so 1000h of 100W consumption would cost $8. I don't remember exactly
what 100W plain light bulbs cost, but it certainly was a lot less than that.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm talking about energy costs and environmental damage, not the dollar price.
Contrary to popular opinion, the retail price rarely if ever captures the
environmental impact of a product.

------
alex_duf
I can't believe an LED that adapts the colour temperature to the time of the
day like F.lux does isn't a standard yet.

LEDs are great but boy are they agressive to the eyes.

(Yes that's a bit unrelated, I figured I'd rant and hope some poeple starts
mass proucing it thanks to my message)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I have no trouble getting hold of 2700K LED bulbs here in Australia.

I agree though, the cold white 4500K or higher bulbs are really only suitable
during the day. Every bulb in my house, CFL or LED, is 2700K.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
The difference between a 2700k and 3000k bulb can be quite large, too. I
prefer the ones I've gotten labelled 2700k, 40w equivalent.

Better LED bulbs also have better power supplies, and therefore less ripple.

------
svantana
Related: I have noted over the years that incandescents with dimmer switches
basically never burn out, and those with normal switches tend to break during
the first second of being switched on. That's led me to the following thought:
would it be possible to build a bulb with a built-in fade-in, either via
bandpass/lowpass filtering or some sort of fading mechanism?

~~~
randallsquared
I promise you that bulbs on dimmer switches do burn out. I just bought a house
and the kitchen light on a dimmer switch burned out within a week of my moving
in. No idea about the age of the bulb, so it's not very good data, but...
Sadly, it's apparently still a crapshoot whether any given LED bulb works
without flicker on any given dimmer of unknown design; I have only found those
with flicker so far.

------
doener
For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now that's coming to LEDs

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12103244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12103244)

~~~
IshKebab
No they weren't and no it isn't.

------
barking
I miss the times when every light fitting was the same (one size, bayonet
style). I don't know how many different types and sizes of fittng we have.
It's a pain replacing bulbs now. I preferred the light from the old
incandescent bulbs too and if they give off a little heat, well living in the
temperate zone we need a little heat after dark.

~~~
stuaxo
The light is better, but the heat is usually not where you want it.

~~~
barking
Won't it amount to the same thing as a heat source anywhere else in a room,
with convection and radiation?

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Modern heat pumps are three to four times more efficient in their use of
electric power than simple electrical resistance heaters.[1]

I have a 7.1kW heat pump, it uses a little over 1.79kW of power generate that
heat, so a thermal efficiency of 3.96:1. Any light bulb, whether it's
incandescent or CFL or LED produces heat a 1:1 thermal efficiency.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump)

~~~
brianwawok
Do many people have heat pumps? Most people I know in the Midwest make 100% if
heat from burning natural gas. So in the winter not a huge loss (just the
delta on cost between electricity and natural gas). In the summer obviously
you pay double..

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Heat pumps / reverse cycle air conditioners are very popular in Australia, but
the temperature here is fairly moderate, even in Tasmania where I live there
are few places where it's below zero for more than the over night period. Heat
pumps don't work so well sub zero.

------
josho
Not altogether different from tech. today. Ie. Year 1 nobody owns a light
bulb, so sell an incredibly efficient bulb. Year 10 everybody owns bulbs so
cheapen the product to increase sales. While today we have incredible free
service to grow market, then when the market had matured and growth falls and
lock-in is complete reduce service to monetize.

Somethings never change.

~~~
userbinator
The article mentions CFLs and LED lamps, which are definitely subject to the
same engineering pressures:

 _This would result in increases of candlepower of 11 and 16 percent
respectively.” That boost in illumination, he suggested, “would be acceptable
to all flashlight users” despite the fact that the higher current would
shorten not just the bulb’s life but also the battery’s.

The cartel’s justification for these changes was that at the higher current
levels, the bulbs produced more lumens per watt. Alas, more current means not
only more brightness but also higher filament temperature and therefore
shorter life._

I have no doubt that LED lamps could be engineered to last essentially
indefinitely --- well past the 100+ year record of early incandescents[1] ---
but most consumers are lead by the advertising to seek higher brightnesses,
which are achieved by running the LEDs at life-shortening higher currents and
temperatures.

Newer ICs with small feature-sizes are subject to far more current density and
electromigration stress, to the point that CPUs are not expected to last more
than a few years, whereas older ICs may remain functional for many decades.

Memory and storage densities are also subject to the same effect, where it
seems "capacity and speed is everything" and data retention and endurance have
been sacrificed. NAND flash started out at 100K+ cycles per bit and 10+ years
retention; now it's more like 1K and 1 year.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-
lasting_light_bulbs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-
lasting_light_bulbs)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Honestly, I'd be fine with optimizing products like that if two things were
true:

\- close-to-perfect recycling infrastructure; i.e. all the stuff that breaks
down and is thrown away actually gets reused to create a new generation of
stuff, with minimum additional input of energy and material

\- civilization was a stable thing; making things throwaway depends on
ensuring there's always a replacement to buy - which will be sort-of the case
only until the world goes to war again (and/or western economy goes seriously
belly-up), at which point we (those of us who survive, that is) will be
cursing previous generations for making all advanced technology break down
after a year of use, often on purpose

Alas, those things are not true, and so I despair over the wastefulness of
what "the market decided".

~~~
khedoros
> Honestly, I'd be fine with optimizing products like that if two things were
> true:

If you're talking about technology being expected to break down and be cheaply
replaced on the scale of single-digit years, it sounds like a never-ending
nightmare. I'd need to add two more points, at least.

\- Strict upgrades (that is, there must be nothing about a new version of a
product that's worse than the one before it); if one feature/technology was
present in the older version of something, the new version must provide the
same capability. I'm thinking of the old hardware I keep around because of
"That one thing that only runs in Windows 98" and "That one thing I can only
flash over a parallel port".

\- A mechanism to automatically, securely, and privately image the new machine
with the previous machine's configuration and data. The nests I build on my
machines feel like home.

Given only your first two points, I still wouldn't buy a machine that I didn't
expect to last at least 5 years, and preferably 10.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I was thinking primarily about appliances - lightbulbs (dumb or smart),
washing machines, cars, cellphones / smartphones, etc. Those two points you
added don't apply to most of them.

That said, I'm not sure if I agree with the first one. At least not
completely. I'd like to have _some_ ability to recover old/special features
but I wouldn't mind if it required some extra work (like tracking down that
motherboard model that still has parallel port on it). In the reality where
all technology is being obsoleted fast and my two points hold, whatever you
want to program over parallel has probably broke down already anyway.

As for the second one - we don't have anything like that even today in wide
use, and we cope :). On Unix you end up moving your dotfiles; on Windows I
used to spend an hour or three for setting things up "my way". Personally I
don't expect a new machine to immediately feel like the old one - but I do
expect to be able to _make_ it so.

~~~
khedoros
I guess that my overall point is that I dislike almost everything about the
idea of disposable possessions, and I would resent being forced into it. I
could imagine leasing a car, my washing machine, or another appliance if the
TCO was reduced, compared to outright ownership for 10 years, but nothing that
I actually care about.

> I'd like to have some ability to recover old/special features but I wouldn't
> mind if it required some extra work (like tracking down that motherboard
> model that still has parallel port on it). In the reality where all
> technology is being obsoleted fast and my two points hold, whatever you want
> to program over parallel has probably broke down already anyway.

If they're willing to replace the parallel device with a functionally-
equivalent piece of hardware that connects to a bus that the new hardware
provides, then that would be equivalent. I'd just want to avoid situations
like this: If I took pains to keep OtherOS on my PS3, the replacement hardware
must not have a firmware that's incompatible with my use of it. If I've got a
gaggle of microcontrollers and a parallel-port programmer for them, the new
hardware must either let me program them.

> On Unix you end up moving your dotfiles; on Windows I used to spend an hour
> or three for setting things up "my way".

On Unix, I move my dot files, a couple hundred gb of data, install about 500
packages, and end up tracking down, compiling, and installing a few things
that aren't usually included in my repos. In Windows, a lot of the data was
already transferred from the Linux side ("Unix" is invariably "Linux", on my
machines), and I spend the next week tracking down installers for software,
re-downloading games, etc. For the next 6 months, I'll be running into things
that I need to track down and re-install. I cope with this by keeping hardware
until it's absolutely unusable for what I want to do. If someone expected me
to upgrade more frequently through a forced process, I'd expect them to ease
my way as much as humanly possible.

------
kevenwang0531
The counter-argument to our fear of planned obsolescence here is the
ridiculous speed of technological improvement in LEDs relative to incandescent
lighting. LED's cost per lumen falls by a factor of 10 every decade (see
Haitz's Law), while a user's actual lighting needs may never exceed 800 lumens
for an standard A19 bulb. Any attempt to form a cartel in this market would be
swiftly defeated by ever-falling unit economics. Far from a cartel, we should
let the government create a standardized LED lifespan rating based on the
actual needs of consumers. For example, if we know the average renovation
cycle for single family houses in the US is ten years, then we should make LED
bulbs that are rated for 10 years. This way, manufacturers can deliver these
products at at the most affordable price point, and consumers for the most
part won't have to worry about replacing their lights ever again.

~~~
Spooky23
LEDs suck less, and are much better than garbage CFL, but are still more
expensive and less versatile than the old bulbs, particularly when you need a
bright bulb.

~~~
wtallis
Fortunately, you only need a bright bulb for flashlights and for fixtures that
are intended for incandescent bulbs. For general interior lighting, a large
array/string of relatively dim LEDs is usually fine.

~~~
_ph_
Not sure why you would think anyone today would use an incandescent bulb in a
flashlight. This is where LEDs just took over. I have a pencil sizes LED
flashlight that matches the brightness of my Maglite only when I put it in
power-saving mode - otherwise its about 10x as bright.

------
known
I personally like CFLs in the right context, but if you want instant light,
dimming or cooler light, they aren't great.
[https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/energy-
saving...](https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/energy-saving-light-
bulbs.html)

------
linkmotif
Great eponymous documentary about this and planned obsolescence
[http://youtu.be/-1j0XDGIsUg](http://youtu.be/-1j0XDGIsUg)

------
cmurf
Blackbody radiators and millions of years of evolution are hard to beat. I
like the energy efficiency of CFL and LED but I do not like the spectral power
distribution or the decay rate and ensuing hue shift of these light sources.

And it's not something only experts notice. If you have multiple bulbs in the
same proximity, one fails, whether replaced under warranty or you just buy a
new one with identical color temperature specs, it'll look different from the
others.

Recapturing heat loss from incandescent to make them more efficient, maybe
even on the order of today's LEDs seems more promising to me than arresting
decay rates and/or the hue shift problems.

~~~
twic
> heat loss from incandescent to make them more efficient, maybe even on the
> order of today's LEDs seems more promising to me

This is already happening - you can apply a 'hot mirror' coating to reflect
infra-red radiation back into the bulb, while allowing visible light out. This
is a very old idea - here's a patent from the early 1960s which states that
the basic principle was already in use:

[http://www.google.com/patents/US3174067](http://www.google.com/patents/US3174067)

And another which applied it specifically to coating a halogen incandescent
light bulb:

[http://www.google.com/patents/US3209188](http://www.google.com/patents/US3209188)

Here's a report / puff piece from 2013 asserting that this technology is
currently taking off and claiming that "by 2018 the efficiency of a hybrid
halogen incandescent light bulb will exceed that of the current compact
fluorescent lamps (CFL) and equal light-emitting diodes (LEDs) on the market
by 2023":

[http://www.smithmillermoore.com/Pdfs/technicalarticles/3-6-1...](http://www.smithmillermoore.com/Pdfs/technicalarticles/3-6-13_DSI_LTB_The_Rebirth_of_theIncandescentLightBulb.pdf)

------
nnain
Wow, thanks for posting this and to the investigative journalist.

Now I know whom to blame for all the heartburn that I (and family) had from
the continuously fusing bulbs.

------
dandare
Milton Friedman famously claimed monopolies/cartels would not exist without
government assistance and that there are only 2 examples of private monopolies
that lasted long period of time (De Beers and NYSE). I suppose he was very
wrong.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdLBzfFGFQU)

~~~
yummyfajitas
The article suggests Friedman was right - this cartel was very short lived.

"Powerful and influential though it was, the Phoebus cartel was short-lived.
Within six years of its formation, the cartel was already starting to
struggle."

Friedman was also right that the cartel existed primarily due to government
assistance:

"GE’s licensing of its basic lightbulb patents gave rise to yet more
alliances, most notably the powerful Patentgemeinschaft (“patent pool”)..."

------
metaos
how many people does it take to screw in an everlasting lightbulb?

~~~
romanr
0\. Because it either don't exist or already screwed in by someone else years
ago.

