Lightbulbs Were So Startup | Hacker News Reader

Lightbulbs Were So Startup

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62 pointskerneis31 comments

The classic book on this is "Electrical Manufacturers 1875-1900".[1] Published by the Harvard Business School, it has Edison's business plan for the Pearl Street station. As I recall, the plan claimed the investment would be paid back in 18 months. It took twice that long.

It was very much a startup. Then came consolidation and mergers, resulting in General Electric.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Manufactures-1875-1900-Com...

Link didn't work, would love to get that book.

There you are, available in the Library:

https://archive.org/details/electricalmanufa0000unse

Do not forget about the library in Archive.org ...

Better URL. [1]

It's in the Stanford libraries, or at least was when I read it years ago.

Also useful is "Men and Volts", an official history of General Electric.[2]

From an investment perspective, it's worth reading the early history of the electrical industry, because it's very much like the history of the computer industry. Just a century earlier. You get to see something go from cutting edge technology with high margins to dull and boring with low margins, over half a century. You get to see the transition from thousands of little companies to a few big ones.

As you keep going into the radio era, you see the transition from paid services to ad-supported ones. It will all look very familiar.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Manufacturers-1875-1900-St...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Men-volts-story-General-electric/dp/B...

Edison didn't stop experimenting with the simple light bulb.

Adding a third connection through the glass to an electrode a distance away from the hot filament was found to conduct some current across that space and was dubbed the Edison effect.

Which is what vacuum tubes are largely based on.

I highly recommend Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes as an excellent book about this time.

> Why go for this very broad market first? Why not build smaller generators in the basement of department stores, lighting up just single buildings or single streets?

Generators are noisy and dirty. At that time they were powered by coal. It would take some extensive modifications to a building to put one in a basement, if it were even possible. Probably it wouldn't have been worth it just for an extra hour or two of people shopping.

How about on the roof, with a smokestack exhausting into the sky? Would it have been too much work to get the fuel up there?

Probably. Remember there's no elevators, coal is heavy. The roof wasn't structurally designed to support a generator and a bin filled with coal.

IIRC, a few wealthy people (I think JP Morgan, who was a big investor in both Edison and Westinghouse) installed generators at their homes so they could host dinner parties and show off the electric lights, but they did complain about the noise and the fumes.

The safety elevator dates to 1852, and by 1867, nearly two decades prior to Edison's power station, Otis had a factory in New York City.

Buildings of over 5--6 storeys in height would likely have had elevators. And probably coal-fired heating as well.

There’s something funny about becoming so wealthy that you decide to set a private generator up in your home (slowly poisoning you in the process). I would say tragic but I don’t know how much sympathy I have for titans of industry.

Reminds me of how rich Italians hated tomatoes cuz silverware interacted with the tomatoes meaning you were slowly ingesting metal (compared to poorer people with wooden utensils and the like)

I think it's more than just a matter of acid leeching from metal utensils and plates. Italy -- rather like early America -- consisted of a relatively urbanized and wealthy North and a poorer and more rural South. Tomatoes (and pizza!) were a staple of Southern Italian cuisine but snobby Northerners ate more pasta and meat.

I don’t think it’s just that!

I can’t find the sourcing for this but what I read was that contemporary descriptions of the taste of tomatoes were outright wrong from certain people, but would make sense if you were indeed eating tomatoes with metal.

This combined with an idea that eating tomatoes makes you sick that persisted… same deal! Tomatoes will make you sick if you’re poisoning yourself in the process.

Now I remember reading this on a pretty barren old fashioned web page so…maybe complete BS

EDIT: this article seems to substantiate my claims a bit https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-w...

Everyone at the time already had private coal furnaces in their basements poisoning their own homes.

Also you had to be a mechanic (an engineer, literally) to run one. You couldn't just turn a key.

Following a point raised by a former post in this page looking for a text: coincidentally, all (three at the time) books mentioned in this page are immediately available on the Library within Archive.org . So, here they are, for convenience, and as a reminder that the Archive may contain texts you are looking for.

-- Passer, Harold - The electrical manufacturers, 1875-1900 : a study in competition, entrepreneurship, technical change, and economic growth

https://archive.org/details/electricalmanufa0000unse

-- Hammond; Pound - Men and volts; the story of General electric

https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich

-- Jonnes, Jill - Empires of light : Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the race to electrify the world

https://archive.org/details/empiresoflighted0000jonn

Q: How many brewers does it take to change a light bulb? A: About 30% less than it takes to change a regular bulb.

How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. Its a hardware problem.

"Hello, technical support. You say your lightbulb isn't working? That's odd, our reference lightbulb is working perfectly."

"Have you tried to ping it? What about updates, are all in? In doubt, turn it off and on again."

Why waste time changing light bulbs when you can rewrite the whole fixture with a brand-new microframeworn

Turn it off and on

Joseph Wilson Swan invented the first practical incandescent electric light.

Warren de la Rue demonstrated the first incandescent light in 1820. He used a platinum filament. He had the right idea - use a filament of a metal with a really high melting point. But platinum was too expensive. After a long detour through Edison's carbonized paper filaments, General Electric figured out how to make fine tungsten wire. High melting point tungsten wire was the basis of a century of light bulbs.

Making tungsten wire wasn't easy. Cast tungsten is brittle. There's a tricky powder metallurgy process which can produce ductile wire that can be coiled.

beware, for at certain circumstance there's nothing more vulgar than the dire lightbulb

We'd be better ditching LEDs and switching back to incandescents, it would be far better for the environment.

All our power comes from renewables and nuclear, to a rough approximation, so if you're turning wind and rain or really excited neutrons into electricity you're not emitting things that change the climate. Converting that into a lot of heat along with light isn't worse for the environment than converting into not a lot of head and light, even if it means using more electricity.

What about the lamps themselves?

An LED lightbulb is a technological marvel made of a bunch of different plastics, fibreglass, copper, bismuth and tin for the solder, gallium arsenide in the LEDs, tantalum in the capacitors, assembled in huge factories using processes involving all sorts of hideous chemicals and a terrifying amount of energy.

On the other hand, an incandescent lightbulb is a milk bottle with a coil of wire in it and all the air sucked out.

Again, to a very rough approximation, something you can make in a blacksmith's forge is probably going to be better overall for the environment than something that requires a multi-billion pound factory.

Go renewable, and go incandescent.

> All our power comes from renewables and nuclear

When this happens, you might have a point.

> An LED lightbulb is a technological marvel made of a bunch of different plastics, fibreglass, copper, bismuth

But so is solar panel so you need to make sure you're not using these.

> When this happens, you might have a point.

98% of the energy here comes from renewables. The 2% that doesn't comes from nuclear, with fossil fuels providing something like 1/50th of a percent.

Why are you all so far behind?

This is an argument with no numbers in based on the idea that metals are scary and a bunch of scare words.

> huge factories using processes involving all sorts of hideous chemicals and a terrifying amount of energy.

As opposed to lightbulbs, which are all handcrafted by artisans using no chemicals or energy?

Not to mention the color spectrum is much more akin to natural light. I've never liked LEDS even high-CRI ones and will continue to buy incandescents. Also they work pretty decent as heating in the winter.

A whole sort of subtle health effects are related to light.

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