@yngmar Not to get all conspiratorial here, but when the lightbulb became ubiquitous businesses did get together & decided to deliberately manufacture them with needlessly short lifespans so they could sell more of them... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
If tl:dw then, yes, there was a “conspiracy” to limit the life of incandescent light bulbs but basically it did optimise for consumer cost because longer-life bulbs would also use more electricity resulting in higher overall cost (they'd give off more heat for the same amount of light). If any manufacturer had made longer-life bulbs and marketed them as such they'd have been effectively diddling the consumer.
So not really “needless”.
Of course, it also meant that the money the consumers spent on lighting went more to the bulb manufacturers and less to the electricity supply companies but I'm sure that was purely incidental. /s
@edavies@TechConnectify@yngmar That's a post-rationalization & speculation; the Phoebus Cartel most certainly did NOT form to lower electricity consumption & costs for consumers - part of the cartel's purpose was raising prices without risking to be underbid by competitors.
We have no idea what would have happened to the product or its ecosystem had the cartel never formed, but we do know that their 1000-hour lifetime cap survived even when the cartel was ended, for example...
I'm just chiming in to say that the fact that the lifespan of 1,000 hours continued to be standard for many decades after the cartel was dissolved should be the big sign that the limited lifespan wasn't that nefarious.
Remember what an incandescent light bulb is. It is far less glass than a jar of jam, a few tiny little support wires, and a little bit of tungsten.
Once machines were building them, they cost pennies.
@jwcph@edavies@yngmar now, of course we can argue over the profit motive and who was benefitting from what but the simple fact is the incandescent light bulb was a consumable good. It would never be a durable good, even the longest lasting versions darken with age as the filament evaporates.
Ask anybody who takes care of vintage pinball machines ;)
@TechConnectify@edavies@yngmar That's all true, of course - but I think it's pretty well-established that the Phoebus cartel was fully nefarious, up to & including fining members whose product exceeded 1000 hours. We're not talking about making bulbs everlasting; even just a 1500h span (down from the 2500 norm of the time) would have saved consumers half the expense, amounting to billions across market & time. That's money literally stolen from everyone & this should not be glossed over.
@jwcph@edavies@yngmar I'm not glossing over it, though. The fact of the matter is a light bulb that could last 1,500 hours is going to be noticeably dimmer than one that only lasts a thousand while using the same amount of power
Perhaps you might be rubbed the wrong way by the cartel making a choice for you, and that's something I can understand. But the operating cost of a light bulb exceeded the purchase cost of a light bulb, so a longer lasting but dimmer bulb is just not ideal.
@jwcph@edavies@yngmar this remains true today. Or at least, wherever you can still buy general purpose incandescent light bulbs.
In the video I show a 40 w appliance bulb and a 40 watt chandelier bulb. They use identical amounts of power, but the appliance bulb was rated for 2,500 hours rather than a thousand and was much dimmer.
Therefore, if you needed more light, you had to burn more of those bulbs and would spend much more money on electricity.
@jwcph@edavies@yngmar and something that's key to remember here is that the light bulb manufacturers, through their relationship with companies that made generators, were very involved in the build out of the electricity grid.
Light bulbs were the main reason people wanted electricity initially, and if they started competing with each other on runtime, people would be using very energy-inefficient bulbs which would make the grid build out harder in addition to costing consumers more money.
@jwcph@edavies@yngmar The cartel, while it had some shady practices going on, was trying to get in front of people focusing on the wrong metric and making bad choices.
Because by the time light bulb production was automated and they were cheap enough that the operating cost exceeded the purchase cost, a long-lasting light bulb was literally a bad deal. They only made sense to use where it was hard to change light bulbs, as for general purpose lamps more frequent replacement was better.
@jwcph@edavies@yngmar and one last point. While I don't want to toot my own horn, if you don't understand what I'm saying, that video I made explains it very well.
Incandescent light bulb technology always had a trade-off between energy efficiency and lifespan. If you overdrive a tungsten lamp, you can get energy efficiency rivaling LEDs! But it will only last seconds. I demoed that.
1,000 hours was simply a decent sweet spot which the cartel standardized on and enforced.
@TechConnectify@edavies@yngmar No, it wasn't. Not even a little bit. Its actions may have done so but that was most definitely not its purpose. You are, in fact, postrationializing & glossing over - maybe not intentionally but that's exactly what you're doing when you go past "the engineering of lightbulbs works like this", which nobody is challenging you on, to "actually the cartel was acting in the best interest of consumers".
My video was made not because I think the cartel was wholesome and pure, but because using it as an example of planned obsolescence... just doesn't work.
Like, I'll be honest and say that what really bothers me about this discussion is that in order for you to view the hourly limit as nefarious, you have to ignore both the engineering reality of tungsten light bulbs and the fact that electricity costs money too, more than purchasing the light bulbs.
As long as the operating cost is greater than the purchase cost, which it was, then that limit was actually in the best interest of consumers.
@jwcph I think, quite understandably, people are very skeptical of corporations making optimization decisions on behalf of other people.
But I don't see any way to describe this as an incorrect decision. Especially since, as you admit, that standard stayed a thing until the next millennium.
I hold both facts in my head that the cartel was a bad organization and that the hourly limit was actually a good thing. I don't think those are incompatible thoughts.
@jwcph sorry to infodump, but I want to make one last point.
Have you met the general public? If they are presented with two light bulb options, one of which is longer lasting, they will probably pick it. Big number better.
They are not going to do the research to figure out that a longer lasting light bulb is dimmer, so if you fill your house with those light bulbs, you'll need higher power bulbs to get the same amount of light.
The limit prevented ignorant people from making bad choices.
And I have to be honest with you, if all they wanted was to maximize their profits - why didn't they pick 250 hours?
All I'm saying is that a shady organization did a thing which happened to benefit practically everybody. I don't really care what the motive was, and as I said from the start, the purpose of my video is purely to say incandescent light bulbs are not a good example of planned obsolescence.
@jwcph I think it is just as revisionist to tell this story without explaining that there is a lifespan and efficiency trade-off.
And I also think it's incredibly unlikely that that was not part of the discussion when the standards were made and enforced.
We had perfected the technology by the time the cartel had been formed. The tungsten filament was the last significant innovation before halogen lamps.
If this cartel just happened to pick the right number by chance, whoopdeydoo.
@jwcph and not to put too fine a point on it, but long-life bulbs which are wasteful on energy just to allow people to buy them less frequently (but which end up costing consumers more because the electricity is more expensive than purchasing the light bulb!) are, to me, the same kind of waste that is driving a pickup truck around to commute.
I don't care who tells me that's a dumb idea! It's a dumb idea.
This is, imo, a rare case of true symbiosis between bulb manufacturers and the public.
@jwcph so, I don't know what wavelength we are missing here but I'm not going to bother arguing anymore.
Frankly, if there's one thing that I think is revisionist? It's the idea that light bulbs could be a durable good in the first place.
Now, we have the technology to make that the case. In fact, we've had the technology for many decades! Fluorescent and high intensity discharge lamps have been around for a very long time. Yet incandescent bulbs stayed the same because they were optimized.