Originally published at: World's oldest lightbulb: 123 years and still glowing - Boing Boing
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I think it’s worth pointing out that the extra money spent for the electricity to power an inefficient early incandescent bulb far exceeds the amount of money spent on replacing the bulb every 1000 hours or so.
You can greatly increase the life of incandescent bulbs by running them at reduced voltage (and therefore lower filament temperatures) but you’ll be getting far fewer lumens per dollar of electricity if you do.
One of the linked references to that bulb says it’s currently operating at 4 watts and putting out just 0.17 lumens, so that’s about 0.043 lumens per watt. A typical, more modern incandescent bulb can create about 15-20 lumens per watt, or about 350 times more efficient. And the modern LEDs are about an order of magnitude more efficient than those.
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One, things were built to last back in the day.
Nope! 'Tis commonly said, but it’s just survivorship bias. ( Survivorship bias - Wikipedia ) Then, as now, bodge jobs and built-barely-to-spec were far more common than massive overbuilding and weird non-optimizations like the 123 year old barely-visible energy hog we’re talking about here.
Alec Watson goes into some detail about the history:
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Yup. “Planned obsolescence” is not a bad word, it’s just economics, plain and simple. It costs money to build things “to last”, and the ROI usually isn’t justified.
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Also modern lightbulbs are much less likely to overheat and burn your house down.
That fire station in Livermore probably would have been spared a lot of calls over the last 123 years if modern electrical standards had existed at the time they installed that old bulb.
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That’s why they don’t make LED bulbs anymore. They last too damn long.
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So, push people to pay more, more often, for a product, is okay, because… economics? No. Just… no. Planned obsolescence screws people over, especially the working poor. We can do better than lining the pockets of the already wealthy and filling up our landfills with shit.
It’s making the poor poorer and poisoning the planet. THAT isn’t fucking justified.
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And - there’s only one lightbulb that lasted that long in the entire world. Let’s use that to justify ripping people off!
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An incandescent lightbulb in 1901 cost about 17 cents, or $6.31 in today’s money. A modern LED lightbulb will not only produce much more light for orders of magnitude less electricity (as @Otherbrother points out above) but it’s also cheaper to purchase at around $5.
This idea that we’re all getting ripped off by modern-day lightbulb manufacturers while our ancestors were getting superior products and craftsmanship just doesn’t hold up.
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This is why it is so hard to buy a reliable refrigerator, as well as other appliances. They are value-engineered to the bone, designed to last until just after the warranty period.
I would absolutely pay a premium for an appliance that would work reliably for decades, to keep them out of a landfill, but it is vanishingly possible to do so.
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This is not an inevitable byproduct of “natural” functioning of the market… this is people making bad choices to ensure that they keep selling us goods every few years, in order to increase their profit margins, regardless of the costs to us as consumers and the environment in general. It’s a choice made to pursue this path, and we can make other choices about such things (or force corporations to make other choices, more like). We don’t need to poison our planet (and ourselves) just to keep a few bloated corporations afloat… We did in fact spend thousands of years without fridges. Now that we have them, we should make them well and make them so that they’re not to our detriment.
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From what I can find electricity was significantly more expensive back then as well (when adjusted for inflation) so the old inefficient bulbs would have been even more financially painful.
Miele make solid stuff, but they cost a bastard fortune.
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Maybe “economics” is a bad word. Especially after the dismissive word “just”, It nearly always means screwing people over for the sake of the greedy few for whom ROI is the sum total of existence.
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The Man in the White Suit syndrome.
There’s that premium. I have Bosch white goods and they are all 10-20 years old (washing machine, tumble dryer, freezer, dishwasher) and going strong.
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It’s a bit of a potato-y pic, cos my phone camera is shit in low light, but that’s my Leak Stereo 30 amp, which is well over 50 years old, and that little red dot is a tiiiiiiiny incandescent bulb that, as far as I know, is the original. Long may it continue, as fuck knows where I’d get a replacement.
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Why do I get the feeling that someone was also on the Wikipedia front page today and saw the ‘Did you know…’ about the Palace Theater Light which is “the second oldest continuously operating light bulb in the world”.
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Exactly. My fridge cost 20 quid off gumtree 
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So much discussion about refrigerators is making me curious to know what people’s experiences have been. I’ve got a cheapo 18-year-old GE fridge that has some plastic drawers and shelves that cracked (which is annoying) but has otherwise worked mechanically for 18 years so far. The only real maintenance I’ve had to do is change the water filter for the ice maker every few years and vacuum out the dust that accumulates on the condenser coils. It’s still reasonably energy efficient by today’s standards. Are there refrigerators of past eras that were more reliable than that? Am I just exceptionally lucky that mine hasn’t broken yet?
