Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This article is terrible, priceonomics I'm ashamed of you.

> raises questions as to whether it is a miracle of physics, or a sign that new bulbs are weaker. Its longevity still remains a mystery.

It's not mystery at all. All you have to do to make a bulb last forever is derate it. The lower the temperature the longer it lasts, (and the less efficient it is).

At the dull red glow this one is emitting it'll last forever.

> Instead, they began to collectively engage in planned obsolescence. To achieve this the companies agreed to limit the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours

I expected better from priceonomics than to repeat urban legends.

You can trade off long life and high efficiency. All that agreement did was decide that 1000 hours was a good trade off point, and standardize the luminous efficiency of incandescent bulbs so all incandescent bulbs of a specified wattage will be approximately the same brightness.

You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Light_... - it even mentions this very bulb.

Note that lifetime goes by the power of 16!!! so it's very easy to derate a bulb and make it last forever.

Just a note that a site moderator has responded to this reply in their comments:

"First of all, we understand the correlation between low output and longevity, and acknowledge that the Centennial Light produces a very low output. Even so, out of hundreds of thousands of low wattage bulbs produced from 1880-1910, it's the only bulb of its kind that has burned for 113-years. Just a handful of bulbs on Earth are older than 60. We think that qualifies as mysterious on some level -- even when scientifically dissected.

Secondly, I appreciate you clarifying the complexity of the Phoebus cartel's actions (admittedly, it's a bigger picture than what we presented) -- but there exists compelling evidence that the cartel exercised planned obsolescence (we understand planned obsolescence to be when the "lifespan of a product is rendered artificially short by design"). Pre-1900, bulbs had lifespans of 1,200-2,500 hours; the cartel set bulbs at 1,000 hours -- even when GE (a member of the cartel) had access to modern tungsten filament technology that could've increased the output of bulbs without so aggressively compromising lifespan. While, as you said, the cartel's motivation was to standardize the haphazard market, the byproduct of this was an overly-assertive cap on longevity."

What really is ridiculous is the supposed agreement to limit bulbs to 1000 hours. Seems like GE and Sylvania weren't in on it, because before congress basically outlawed the common incandescent, I was buying long-life bulbs by those companies that were rated to last 20,000 hours. The only reason people's experience of light bulbs was that they only lasted 500-1000 hours was because they kept buying the 49-cent a bulb Wal-Mart crap.

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