Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated

There is an excellent video about Lightbulb Cartel by Technology Connections, highly recommended if you want an engineers perspective, with no 'great conspiracy' hype. ▶ this video

For an even deeper dive into this topic... Technology Connections: Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated ▶ this video

It's true that the Phoebus cartel arranged to have light bulbs die after a certain number of hours, but bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption. The cartel-defined lifetime limit sits very close to the sweet spot for all of those metrics for incandescent bulbs. Technology Connections explained this well in a video about a year ago: ▶ this video

Actually Technology Connections made a great youtube video on this: ▶ this video The gist is that by running bulbs at a lower power, you can greatly prolong its life, but the downside is that it doesn't heat up as much, and since emissions spectrum correllates with temperature, ends up being much worse at converting electricity to light, which ends up being not worth it.

Nice video from the well known channel Technology Connections: ▶ this video => It's complicated. Yes, there was a cartel, but it was not all bad. There were legitimate reasons to go for 1000h light bulbs.

It wasn't as simple as them wanting to make more money: ▶ this video Key points from an AI summary: - Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan. - Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply "better" products being suppressed. - The 1,000 hour target was a reasonable compromise that balanced these competing priorities, not necessarily a sinister plot. - Even after the Phoebus cartel dissolved, the 1,000 hour lifespan remained the industry standard for general-purpose incandescent bulbs.

Honestly that story is really not as simple as people suggest it is. There is a tradeoff between bulb life and brightness and standardization may have been good for the industry. Technology Connections does a thoughtful deep dive in to this story in this recent video: ▶ this video

Its a bit of a myth for ever lasting bulbs, its more complicated than that. The life time was a trade off of colour and brightness. If you made them very red shifted and quite dim then there are bulbs that are very old still around, but they don't produce much light and never did. The harder you drive the filament the better the light properties but the quicker it died. The industry choose a point for trade offs as a standard. You can watch about the history of it on Technology connections. ▶ this video Saying that the Dubai Philips LED bulbs really do last a lot longer since they have twice the filaments and run the filaments a lot less hard as a result (as well as being more efficient). It is possible nowadays to make an LED that wont fail anytime soon although LEDs are already much better than incandescents in that regard but there are ones that will likely survive your lifetime available at a higher price but only in Dubai. Most LED bulbs are designed to fail sooner, but they are also cheaper. Those 10k recharge batteries are absolutely coming and we will have them in a few years time, li-ion as it stands today will simply be obsolete.

Technology Connections talked a lot about this and the supposed planned obsolescence of light bulbs ▶ this video TL;DW: (if I rember correctly) Bulbs with shorter lifespans are generally more energy efficient. There was good reasons to not making bulb that last forever.

The Phoebus cartel didn't collude just to make the light bulbs have a shorter lifespan. They upped the standard illumination a bulb emitted so that consumers needed fewer of them to see well. With an incandescent you have a kind of sliding scale of brightness:longevity (with curves on each end that quickly go exponential, hence the longest lasting light bulb that's so dim you can barely read by its light). The brighter the bulb, the shorter the lifespan. ▶ this video

> There are some original Edison bulbs that still work, yet you'd be lucky to get a year out of a modern incandescent. ▶ this video > Same thing happened to LED bulbs. Because LED Bulbs cook your LEDs and are stupid design. Get a permanent LED fixture with decent passive cooling and they will last for decades. Adapting LEDs into the same Plug as Incandescent lighting just does not work.

And even lightbulbs have to make tradeoffs between efficiency and lifespan. Yeah, all else being equal the efficient bulb is better, but it's quite rare that all else actually is equal. ▶ this video