The Conspiracy against Eternal Light

a reply to: thebulldog

Yep, Planned Obsolescence. Reminds me of Brave New World and the push not to mend or make things last but to consume happily above all else.
"The more stitches, the less riches. Isn't that right? Mending's anti-social.'"

As a matter of fact a lot of Mr. Huxley's material is scarily becoming or has already become reality in modern life.

Is this practice legal? If so, HOW? To actually make things that will break in order to create profit...In this current financial climate, it's disgusting? People struggle and these companies make things so much worse.

Way back in 1899 at a remote Colorado lab Tesla listened to the electrical storms on Jupiter using an avalanche device with transistors he called "negative resistors". An unlikely pair Mark Twain and Tesla were friends and spent time together in Teslas lab. Tesla claimed he had heard messages from the planet Mars and was concerned about the effect the Martians might have on Earth. Maybe he was dreaming about potential misuse of the coming electronic media?

Long before the technical revolution and the instant electronic transmissions people spent nights reading articles by authors like Twain. Twain predicted his own death with the coming of Haleys comet in 1910. That was the year the new radio technology was born.

www.stevenjohnson.com...

They didn't have to use tubes as amplifiers but it was more profitable to do so and the radio tube industry flourished for decades. 39 years after Tesla heard communications from Mars, Orson Welles hoaxed the US with his 1938 "War of the worlds" radio broadcast. Solid state radios and television were not made public until the 1940's and 50's.

My Grandfather tried to get me interested in that change, he said it was like the end of a world. Reading by lamp light was suddenly supplanted by listening to music and news on the radio. The longest recorded life for a Vacuum tube valve was 232,592 hours achieved in a radio transmitter used continuously in northern Ireland from 1935 to 1961.

originally posted by: Skyfloating

These are three examples only. Coupled with the fact that bulbs last thousands of hours more in other countries not subject to our standards, has led some to believe that there is a Conspiracy to lower the Lifetime of a bulb by Manufacturers, in order to ensure profit for themselves at the expense of the public.

Thomas Edison, the first mass-producer of the Lightbulb, may himself have believed that Lightbulbs could shine on indefinitely.*

...

Do you think there is any truth to the Light-Bulb Conspiracy Theory?

First thing: of course corporations rig their products to be as fragile as possible, so the buyer will break them and then have to buy another one, and/or the product lasts a short period of time. That is a given.

Second though: As I understand it, the old light bulbs that are still burning today from a century ago use a thick carbon filament, as opposed to a thin tungsten filament.

There are benefits and drawbacks to both. A thick carbon filament is extremely durable, as evidenced, but its light output is heavily in the infrared band. This means both the light quality and light intensity per watt is very low, and CRI (how well it renders true colors) is low.

On the other hand, a thin tungsten filament is very fragile and will break easily from use and/or shock. However it is able to produce a brighter light in the visible band and its CRI is much higher than a thick carbon filament, on a per watt basis.

So you have your benefits and drawbacks.

I have a specialty carbon filament bulb at 60w. You can get them at the hardware store for like 10 dollars. It is a very long, thin strand of carbon filament, and at 60w it only produces 360 lumens. A normal 60w tungsten incandescent will produce double that.

Also to note, is that on start up is when the majority of wear will occur on a light bulb filament. For a tungsten filament, it is rapidly heating from room temperature up to several thousands of degrees F, and repeatedly putting a material through this rapid heating/cooling cycle weakens it. Spot lights for photography or stage sets can run as little as 2 hours (maximum life) and really be only turned on once (they can reach 6000 degrees F, a mere 200 degrees below the elements melting point) before burning out and needing replacement.

Best way to break a normal everyday light bulb internally is to rapidly flick it on and off over and over again. It will break fairly quickly because of the rapid heating/cooling.

Point being, that if that 100+ year old light ever goes out, despite its awesome durability thus far, there is a high chance it will break its filament on its next start up, simply due to extreme long term use. It cant be let to cool off.

So you have your benefits and drawbacks to both kinds of lighting. Really, there is no superior source of light, not even LEDs, which dont have the most efficient lumens per watt ratio, as is commonly thought (High Pressure Sodium lights are the most efficient lumens per watt of any source of commercially available lighting).

Almost looks like free-energy to me.

Nothing whatsoever to do with the mythical "free energy" legend. Its still drawing power from a generator that is consuming fuel, is it not? That makes it neither free in the economic sense of not costing money (in fact its highly inefficient in producing lumens), nor the physical sense (it is still increasing the total level of entropy of the universe).