The New York Times ran a front page article about old stocks of incandescent bulbs being sold to poor people at dollar stores, resulting in hundreds of dollars in electric bills, for those who can afford them the least. The lighbulb is a fascinating device, in all its incarnations.
Both my partner and I miss the old incandescent bulbs. The pure, non-wavering, warm light is a joy to the eye. Fluorescent bulbs commonly used in offices (at least not long ago, for I've been blessed with the ability to stay away from offices of all kinds for more than two decades now) - often give me migrane symptoms: I hear a buzzing deep in my head, and everything gets a bit distorted. But turn on a hot, glowing bulb, and my brain rejoices at the subtle detail - the sligtly blurred shadows cast by the long glowing filament, the noticeable lack of flickering, the slightest touch of radiant heat on my face from a lamp nearby...
And suddenly, you couldn't get bright incandescent bulbs. We ran to Home Depot and bought a case of 100W bulbs, I remember. In the US, when something becomes prohibited by decree, it's illegal for individuals, but corporations can do whatever they want; you can always buy toxic items by the case or the gross. Want some asbestos-based roofing tar? You can still get it if you are a 'professional'.
The lightbulb became the universal symbol for having an idea.
The simplicty of the symbology - the switch is flipped, power rushes through and night turns into day.
The story of Edison's tribulations to find the right filament material, imprinted on my three-year-old brain.
The beauty of the thin glass refracting and reflecting light. The gallant pear shape.
The implications of a scientific apparatus: the physicist of an age long past, blowing his own glassware with a hot torch; the hum of the vacuum pump getting ready to evacuate the cooling vessel.
The glass pedestal, proudly holding the metal supports for the filament.
The thin metal filament, which upon closer examination is itself a tight helix of a much thinner wire. Wait, that too is a helically-wound wire!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#/media/File:Tungsten_filament.JPG
The elegant angles of the threading of the metal base playing off the smoothness of the glass. A century of engineering know-how making sure it does not jam.
All that makes a lightbulb what it is, a lightbulb.
Incandescent lightbulbs are wasteful, and that is entirely true. They should be called heatbulbs, for most of the energy goes into heat, with a very small percentage (5% or so) converted to light.
Is that really bad? On the East Coast of the US, a good chunk of the year is cold, and homes require heating. Electric energy is priced reasonably enough in most of the US, and getting a little heat from lightbulbs around the house, during the dark, cold part of the year, carries a nearly zero cost.
In fact, in places where much heat is generated by burning heating oil, or even gas, we are better off heating with lightbulbs. At least then, the pollution is shifted to large power-generating plants which can be made to run more efficiently than forcing homeowners to update their ageing furnaces.
The east-coast renter will pay additional electric charges, because heating is built into the lease, generally. Well, the poor get to pay extra, as usual.
And businesses still burn the lights all night. I would bet that all the energy wasted by lighting every floor of every building in major metropolitan areas is on the same order as the savings introduced by using energy efficient bulbs at home.
I was shocked to find the details of the global lightbulb cartel. It turns out that the bulb manufacturers got together in Geneva in 1925, to impose strict operating time limits on lightbulbs. 1000 hours was the limit, and those producing longer-lasting lightbulbs were penalized. An amazing amount of materials research and engineering went into making sure that lightbulbs fail at around 1000 hours.
There is an incandescent lightbulb that's been burning continuously for a century or so, by the way. It is possible.
The replacement lightbulbs, Compact Fluorescents, use mercury, a highly toxic element, to generate light. Regular, buzzy office fluorescent bulbs are much worse, containing a lot of mercury. For some reason, they were not prohibited in this country, even though a cleanup after a 4-foot fluorescent is broken requires evacuating and quaranteening the area while the dust settles, wetting down the debris and gently collecting (not vacuuming) into a hazardous materials container, while wearing a good respirator and a hazmat suit.
Early CF lamp packaging indicated the presence of mercury and suggested using appropriate safety methods for disposal and cleanup. A year later, the notices disappeared from packaging, presumably from political pressure. After all, we must replace the evil incandescent bulb ruining our environment, the greenwashing story goes. Never mind that the replacement is known to cause madness and death, and not just in California.
My house was stuffed to the gills with all kinds of mercury lamps when I bought it. I still have a closet full of them, dreading their disposal. It is really hard to find a place that will take them - although my neighbors just stuff them into the trash can every now an then. I hate to think about what happens later.
CFLs, to be fair, are a bit better than the old fluorescents. CFLs buzz at a much higher frequency, and after a while, the warm-colored CFLs became nicer to the eye. Not nearly as nice as the good old incandescents, but nicer.
The energy savings are considerable - weighing in at around 1/3 or better of incandescents. They still got quite hot, in spite of not having a filament.
We managed to avoid the CFL alltogether, using our stockpiled incandescents.
Toward the end of our incandescent pile, while looking for a new supply, we found some amazing lightbulbs. It turns out we were not the only ones who loved the pure incandescent light!
We discovered amazing bulbs that throw truly beautiful light. Neodymium bulbs cost around $10 at the time, so only a few fixtures were outfitted with those. But the light was well worth it.
The early LED 'showerhead' bulbs were a joke. As an electronics buff who built his own computer in 1980 I am well familiar with LEDs, the drops of epoxy that emitted a dimmish red or green glow. The glow got brighter over the years, and eventually bright enough to hurt. A blue LED was introduced, allowing the red-green-blue mixing for an eye-searing version of white light.
Soon enough we got white LEDs. Well, there is no such thing as a diode emitting white light - it can only pump out light of a single frequency, but the fluorescent technology works with LEDs. Pure light can force mercury salts to fluoresce white, and we are back full circle - except at least, the toxic crap is encapsulated into epoxy - a mixed blessing. It will not poison you, but the epoxy will be there forever, leaching out crap on the scale of millenia.
The light got better and better. It flickered a lot (in order to avoid overheating the diode it stays on for a short period followed by a cooling off period at the rate of some kilocycles-per-second, usually), then less - although scanning the eye fast, past the light source, will sometimes reveal a chain of lights, a persistence of vision trick. More headaches.
LEDs are supposed to last something like 100,000 hours, and probably do. LEDs dim over time. The rating is generally the time for the light source to dim to 50% of the original output.
Unfortunately, LEDs require a sophisticated power supply - simply connecting them to the mains will burn them out instantly. They require a constant current supply ideally, but failing that, you can turn them on and off quickly enough to let them cool down.
The power supply is stuffed into the base of the monstrosity usually still shaped like a bulb. Cheap components are used in order to be competitive, especially capacitors - which have a limited life span at best. I noticed that the better-made LED controllers from China now feature 'Japanese-made capacitors'.
So LEDs fail constantly, in very annoying ways - flashing, flickering, or just dimming and heating up.
Surprised? Not at all.
The LEDs come in much lower wattage than corresponding incandescents. For a long while the packaging insisted that 6W LEDs were equivalent to 100W. I thought I was going blind. But no, they are just much dimmer. It's all a lie - I don't know how they measure the output, or whether it has to do with human perception. I need a 15W bulb before it looks anything like 100W.
Even then the light is just a little wrong. It's bright, and it hurts the eye, and it lights objects directly under, but then it somehow disappears. The streetlights are weird that way - darkness with really bright lights above. It feels like light is just sucked into the darkness.
Well, I did get used to the LEDs, and now find some of them quite pleasant. The warm LEDs are pretty good. It's nice to be able to dim all fixtures, and the remote-controled bulbs that change color in addition to a bright warm light are pretty useful on occasion.
Dimmable LEDs are a whole other debocle. I have several large boxes of LEDs that don't work in some fixtures but work fine in others, in spite of being 'dimmable'. I hate to throw them out because they are expensive and I don't like polluting. But it is becoming a problem.
The electric bills are way down.
I still have a bunch of incandescents I put in during the winter.
I will always love incandescent light.
