Yep, run an incandescent under voltage or with an overbuilt filament and they can last forever.
I don’t know if they still make them anymore, however, just a few years ago you could still buy commercial-duty incandescent bulbs which were rated for 130V but were actually run at the standard 120V, extending their life.
Anecdotally, I have three incandescent can lights in my living room which have never been changed since the house was built 24 years ago. They were on a standard dimmer and now on a smart dimmer which I usually set to 10 or 20% when watching TV and off otherwise.
I am inclined to doubt theories of the flavor that they just built them better because of more moral fiber or something back in the day; but I would be curious about the impact of improved industrial process control and achievability of tighter tolerances at acceptable costs.
You can aspire to build barely to spec; but if your tolerances are all file-to-fit tier unless you pay for heroic master craftsmanship there’s likely to be an incentive to put your actual target somewhat north of the spec just to keep the amount of testing required to keep abjectly unsuitable units from reaching customers and the number that need to be scrapped down.
If your tolerances are quite tight and behavior nicely dialed in you can put your target a lot closer to the spec because you can be more confident that product will actually land where you aim it.
The latter case is substantially better overall; less testing, less scrap, fewer issues in situations where sloppy tolerances can interact badly between parts and cause mechanical wear or lightbulbs that have the wrong resistance because the filament is right but one of the support wires is wrong; but would presumably generate fewer heroic outliers that were on the “+20%” side of “+/-20” tolerances.
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. Phoebus 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 Combi-nation). Given this state of general repression, there seems no place for a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.
But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal …
