planned obsolescence it's an Insidious
thing a business that designs the
perfect product that lasts forever will
run out of customers once everybody has
one and running out of customers is a
pretty bad strategy for a business which
strives to be
immortal this simple reality when viewed
with a slightly Twisted mindset can be
seen as a reason to never build the
perfect product and it is often argued
quite convincingly I should say that
companies today are actively making
their products worse to guarantee you'll
have to buy another one before too long
now I'm not here to make any accusations
though I do certainly wish to see us
endowed with a right to repair the
things we own and maybe some other
things while we're at it uh anyway
though I won't comment on what may or
may not be happening today between the
first and second world wars an actual
documented conspiracy between light bulb
manufacturers across the globe existed
the the feeis cartel an arrangement
between ozam Phillips General Electric
and several others established a maximum
light bulb life expectancy of 1,000
hours the organization even conducted
tests on each other's products and
issued fines to its members when their
light bulbs took just a little too long
to burn out most insidiously they
defined this 1,000 hour maximum after
light bulbs with significantly longer
2500 hour life LIF spans already
existed that would seem to point
straight at planned obsolescence after
all the lifespan of light bulbs had
steadily been going up before the cartel
was formed so surely we were on our way
to some sort of everlasting light bulb
stoer the manufacturers coming together
to impose an artificial limit like they
are known to have done seems on the
surface at least nothing but a ploy to
sell more light bulbs and light bulb
saes just so Happ happened to increase
after the lifespan limit was enforced
which reversed a worrying Trend sure
smells like planned obsolescence to me
indeed the smell is so strong that many
people point to the Feebas cartel as the
Genesis of planned obsolescence or at
least a very clear and undeniable
example and perhaps the most irrefutable
piece of evidence comes from of all
places a garage in California hanging in
the firehouse in the town of Livermore
is the sent anial light an incandescent
light bulb that has been burning nearly
continuously since
1901 surely that light bulb with its
century plus longevity proves that light
bulbs never truly need to burn
out well okay so have you ever actually
seen an image of the Centennial light
here it
is yeah it's barely glowing is it see
this topic is one that actually feels
weird to cover I definitely think that
planned obsolescence has happened and
arguably is still happening today and I
wasn't just making word play back then I
am genuinely on the side of the right to
repair movement and giving something an
artificial expiration date just to
ensure you can sell more is uh pretty
gross however the incandescent light
bulb is just not a good example of
planned obsolescence for lots of reasons
and using it as evidence of planned
obsolescence genuinely bothers me am I
about to well actually the febus cartel
story yeah here's the thing when the
story of the phebus cartel is told those
telling it have a bad habit of
downplaying or even outright ignoring
the fact that there were real
significant actual advantages to a light
bulb that only promised a hours of
operating time such bulbs produced a
wider looking light which was easier to
see under and they could produce more
light with the same amount of power
which meant they cost you the person
paying that power bill less to
operate that's a pretty important caveat
don't you think glossing over that
little bit of context is bad enough but
a second rather important fact tends to
get skipped too that being that light
bulbs were never a durable good and once
we figured out how to automate their
production they weren't exactly
expensive I mean it's literally just a
little bit of glass a little bit of wire
and a little bit of metal and resin to
form the screw base there is more than
five times as much glass in this empty
jar of maple butter than there is in
this 40 W light bulb it took us years
and years to figure out how to make
these things sure but once we were able
to use machines to crank these out in
big old light bulb
factories well this isn't a very complex
object now is it no it's not but before
we continue we need a little bit of
background incandescent light bulbs are
called that because they rely on the
phenomenon of incandescent to produce
light in a bulb incandescence is this
weird thing that happens when stuff gets
really hot all things emit
electromagnetic radiation and as they
get hotter they start to emit waves with
shorter and shorter wavel lengths until
eventually those wavelengths hit the
visible light spectrum that our peepers
detect that's why the wires in your
toaster glow and orangey red they're
just so hot that they're emitting some
visible light but not a lot they're
definitely really hot but you need to
get much much hotter to shift from a
dull orange glow to something more
useful and we knew how to do that just
fine we had been playing about with this
electricity business for quite sometime
and plenty of experiments were done
showing thin wires glowing quite
brightly the trouble was that when you
make things so hot that they start
emitting white light those things tend
to either melt or react with oxygen in
the air and burn and that little problem
is what the light bulb sought to
fix after years and years of
experimentation various people whom I
won't name to avoid comment section
flame Wars arrived upon a filament which
could get extremely hot without melting
when exposed to the atmosphere with all
that oxygen floating around it would
still burn though and quickly go up and
smoke so we put it in a clear glass bulb
that we sucked all the air out of with a
vacuum pump now there was no oxygen in
there for the material of the filament
to react with so it couldn't possibly
burn and there you go that's what a
light bulb is an impossibly hot bit of
wire protected from burning Away by its
own little envelope of nothing the first
functional light bulbs didn't last long
at all but we were still learning how
best to make them we tried all sorts of
things different shapes and materials
for the filament the bulb itself the
support structures more perfect vacuums
and eventually we got pretty good at it
but we still had an insurmountable
barrier the melting point of the carbon
filament there was a hard limit to how
hot you could run the filament before it
broke so early light bulbs produced a
rather dull orangey yellow light light
still beat the pants off of gas lamps
though but then we figured out how to
form thin wire filaments from tungsten
that alone was quite the engineering
feat tungsten's hardness and brittleness
make it very difficult to work with but
figuring it out was the Holy Grail of
light bulb makers because of tungsten's
extremely high melting point the highest
of any known element at
3,422 De C
6,192 de fah or
3,695 Kelvin
de if we could just crack that code we
could make the most brilliant light
bulbs anyone had ever seen of course we
did and with tungsten filaments whiter
brighter longer lasting light bulbs
started to become the norm a couple of
other Innovations were still on the way
the coiled coil structure of the
filament through its Compact and dense
shape allowed it to run hotter with less
input power and we found that adding a
little inert gas to the bulb like argon
or Krypton worked better for Tungsten
filament longevity than a pure
vacuum but really aside from those two
things the light bulb wouldn't change
anymore uh this Appliance bulb I just
bought in a store the other day is no
different from the light bulbs
manufactured a century ago it's just a
piece of tungsten wire glowing because
it gets literally white hot when we run
current through it positioned inside of
a thin glass bulb filled with an inert
gas at low pressure to prevent the
filament from reacting with oxygen and
burning away not exactly the Pinnacle of
complexity however the filament reacting
with oxygen and burning isn't the only
issue we have although tungsten won't
melt until it hits
3,695 Kelvin it does have this annoying
habit of evaporating when it gets close
to there or I guess technically that
would be sublimating anyway as the lamp
is operated little bits of tungsten
become liberated from the filament and
wind up on the inside surface of the
glass which both darkens the glass bulb
and weakens the filament with time
eventually the filament becomes so weak
that it breaks and Pop Goes the light
bulb and here's where the heaping
spoonful of of omitted Nuance from the
Feebas cartel story comes back into play
how quickly a light bulb Burns Out
depends on how hot you run the filament
the closer you get to tungsten's Melting
Point the faster evaporation happens
which leads to the filament weakening
more quickly and thus results in a
shorter lifespan for the light bulb
sounds like we should just not run them
too hot then but see as you get closer
to tungsten's melting point you also get
a brighter whiter more energy efficient
light bulb there's a tradeoff between
quality and efficiency of the light
produced by an incandescent light bulb
and how long that light bulb will run
before it fails this is merely a
physical reality of all non-halogen
tungsten filament lamps it's a reality
we understood in 1925 when the cartel
was formed and it's a reality that
continues to be real for what few
incandescent light bulbs remain on the
market for example these are both 40
watt incandescent light bulbs one of
them is an appliance bulb like You' put
in your oven rated for $25 00 hours of
runtime the other is a ceiling fan bulb
which is really just a general purpose
bulb with a candleabra base this bulb
only promises 1,000 hours of runtime and
boy are these run times weirdly similar
to how the cartel story started that's
strange anyway when we compare the two
side by side the longer lasting
Appliance bulb is noticeably dimmer and
yellower despite using a nearly
identical amount of power it is a longer
lasting light bulb but it is also
objectively worse at its single job of
producing light from electrical power so
which is really the better light
bulb sort of depends on what you're
going for doesn't it but these are two
different light bulbs maybe there's some
sort of manufacturing issue with the
appliance bulb and it shouldn't be that
dim well to demonstrate this slightly
more scientifically I've got a big old
box of of 555 indicator lamps these
little light bulbs are designed to run
at 6.3 volts and consume about 1.5 watts
of power when run at their rated voltage
they're definitely not the brightest
things out there they barely produce a
visible glow when under this lampshade
but watch what happens when I double the
voltage the light has gotten much
brighter and wher too it's also now
drawing nearly five watts of power and
boy is this the brightest 5 watt light
bulb I've ever seen look how much
brighter it is than this 4 watt
NightLight bulb that's impressive so why
don't we run all light bulbs like this
well you probably already know it's
because they don't last long at all when
you do this while we are getting way
more light out of this thing the
filament is getting weaker by the minute
this bulb was only run for 10 minutes at
Double its rated voltage and already we
can see significant darkening of the
glass that's from the evaporated
tungsten which has deposited on the
glass and that happens in all
non-halogen incandescent bulbs but it's
particularly noticeable with these
little fellas since the bulb itself is
so small to give a true running time at
this voltage I ran a stopwatch on a test
of a fresh bulb and found it only
survived for 65 minutes at 12.6 volts
and that's what it looked like in the
end and I want to be clear here the
melting point of tungsten isn't the
issue I'd estimate that at 12.6 volts
we're running the filament at somewhere
near 3,100 Kelvin and tungsten won't
melt until 3695 plus tax the problem is
the rate of evaporation of the filament
that happens faster with every increase
in temperature so the hotter you run it
the shorter the life it will live if you
just keep on cranking the voltage up you
will hit the melting point and will
experience an instant burnout out but
after sacrificing several bulbs for the
good of science I found that 20 volts
would keep us just below the melting
point and we could see just how bright
we can get one of these suckers and boy
is it astonishingly bright here's that
table lamp running the 40 W general
purpose incandescent bulb again and now
here's that same lamp but with our teeny
little 555 indicator running at 20 volts
that's nothing short of amazing
and a side-by-side comparison reveals
it's just about as bright it might even
be a little brighter but it's hard to
make a direct comparison because of how
drastically whiter the light is in
person this was weird as it was an
incandescent light bulb burning with the
appearance of a bright white LED or
fluorescent lamp the brightness is
impressive enough on its own but look at
the power draw we're only using half an
amp at 20 volts which works out to about
10 watts so we're seemingly getting four
times as much light per watt that's
amazing and Rivals the efficiency of
some LED bulbs today the catch well
let's let the video actually play
immediately the light begins to darken
before long it's much less bright than
the bulb on the left and it lasts a mere
41 seconds before the filament breaks
and this was a really good showing
what's going on on here is that as the
filament loses material through
evaporation small weak spots form we can
actually see multiple breaks in this
footage but the filament keeps falling
in on itself and keeping the circuit
intact eventually though one of these
fractures leaves a gap the circuit is
broken and the light goes out depending
on how that happens though you can
sometimes bring the bulb back to life
with a little percussive maintenance if
you manage to complete the circuit the
tungsten will sort of spot weld itself
back together for a while anyway here's
the rub as I've hopefully demonstrated
the design of the tungsten filament
incandescent light bulb was always an
exercise in balancing lifespan with
Energy Efficiency and quality of light
output and this is why using the febus
cartel as evidence of planned
obsolescence rubs me the wrong way by
the time it was formed in 1925
scientists and Engineers understood the
lifespan efficiency tradeoff there are
even equations for it we had essentially
perfected the tungsten filament lamp by
the time the cartel was formed and you
simply cannot optimize for lifespan
without making the light bulb worse at
being a light bulb the 1,000 hour
operational Target was simply a decent
sweet spot in the middle plus of course
it was a nice round number figure and
those are hard to resist somebody just
had to Define what that sweet spot was
and make it a standard and that's what
happened to be clear I'm not forgetting
that this was a literal oligopoly with
documented collusion efforts that
undoubtedly set prices artificially high
and did all sorts of other slimy things
too I'm not here saying the cartel was
some sort of wonderful
organization but I feel like ignoring
the reality of the efficiency lifespan
trade-off in tungsten lamps is Dishon
honest it would definitely be Insidious
if the 2500 hour light bulbs the cartel
sought to extinguish were just as good
and just as efficient as the agreed upon
1,000 hour light bulb but that just
wasn't the case longer life light bulbs
were always duller dimmer and thus
required more power to produce the same
amount of light what I think really
bothers me is that you don't have to
look that deeply to uncover this context
just looking up the cartel on Wikipedia
reveals that some Engineers deemed 1,000
hours a reasonable figure to balance the
various operational aspects of an
incandescent bulb since longer lifespan
means reduced efficacy lumens per watt a
longer life bulb of a given wattage puts
out less light and therefore
proportionately more heat than a shorter
life bulb of the same wattage
nevertheless long life incandescent
bulbs were and are available with
lifespan ratings up to 2500 hours
and these do in fact produce less light
per watt there is even an excerpt from a
report from the monopolies and
restrictive practices Commission of the
United Kingdom from 1951 which says
quite plainly that while it might look
like Hanky Panky was going on
conflicting factors make it impossible
to view the great light bulb life
shortening as anything nefarious but
then I hear you asking why establish
tests to make sure the bulbs didn't last
too long assessing a fine to your
members for making a light bulb that's
just a little too good seems pretty
iffy well again would it actually be
good that's Up For Debate and it's kind
of the whole point I'm making here also
of note many of the companies in the
cartel were also in the business of
running power grids or at least building
much of the Machinery that made those
power grids work they intimately
understood that long life light bulbs
would make that part of their business
harder and more expensive especially as
more and more people got electricity in
their homes and electricity demand grew
that's a pretty solid reason to start
favoring Energy Efficiency over lifespan
and enforcing a standard to that end
especially when to repeat myself this is
just a little bit of glass and a little
bit of wire made not by human hands but
by machines which could crank out tens
of thousands per day they were not by
any means precious objects now I foresee
some of you viewing that light bulb
makers were also in the business of
powering generation as evidence of a
conflict of interest and maybe it was
but they sure didn't take advantage of
that position if their only goal was to
maximize the money you gave them well
then they should have been selling
nothing but long life light bulbs that
needed much more power for the same
amount of light but that's not what
happened it was better for all parties
involved to run cheap light bulbs as hot
as you could in exchange for lower
operating costs I know how some folks
feel about higher authorities making
decisions on the consumer's behalf
though I can assure you that's happening
all the time in the private sector you
just may not be so aware of it but
honestly establishing a 1,000 hour
lifespan was the correct decision or at
the very least far less Insidious than
it seems the ultimate evidence of this
is that it never changed the cartel
dissolved in 1939 and yet decades later
1,000 hours remained the operational
Target for general purpose light bulbs
later on you could get so-called long
life bulbs if you wanted to much like
the suppliance bulb here but to produce
the same amount of light they needed
more power and thus consumed more energy
this Washington Post article from 1981
points out that to produce the same
amount of light as a 75 wat Standard
Life bulb you need to move up to a 100
watt long life bulb is it really worth a
33% increase in energy consumption just
to avoid buying a 90c light bulb every 6
months as a matter of fact objectively
no in 1981 the average cost for
electricity in the US was 6.9 cents per
kilowatt hour nice over the 20 500 hours
of Lifetime those extra 25 watts would
amount to 62.5 kilowatt hours of energy
expenditure which would cost you
$431 so by choosing the equally bright
but longer lasting light bulb you will
spend $44.31 more on energy but you
won't even save two bucks on light bulbs
that means objectively you were spending
more money running one of those long
life bulbs than you would if you were
just buying standard light bulbs and
changing them more frequently and that's
why the article suggests to use long
life bulbs only in hard to reach places
where the extra running costs are worth
avoiding a bulb change out and that's
with retail prices for light bulbs
remember how I said they were really
cheap to make well I was talking with my
mom and dad about this video project and
they told me something interesting back
in the day ComEd that's the power
utility here in the Chicago area would
just give you free light bulbs when you
paid your power bill and it turns out
they still had some ComEd branded light
bulbs in their bag of bulbs my
grandfather used to say that he never
paid for light bulbs thanks to comed's
free light bulb program oh by the way
this is a three-way bulb which means it
has two filaments inside one of them is
30 watts and the other is 70 Watts using
a second ring-shaped contact on the
screw base a three-way lamp socket can
select between one the other or both
filaments allowing you to operate this
as a 30 70 or 100 watt light bulb the
middle contact Powers the larger
filament and the cycle of 0 30 70 and 70
+ 30 is the reason some lamps require
two clicks to switch between on and off
those lamps are meant to use bulbs like
this and then they let you select
between bright Brighter Brightest and
off you can get LED versions of bulbs
like this but they're usually tucked
away with the specialty bulbs in the
store and are weirdly expensive anyway
ComEd because they had to deal with the
operational challenges of running a
growing power grid had an incentive to
hand out efficient light bulbs like
candy to keep people from focusing on
the wrong metric and buying longer
lasting but less efficient light bulbs
which would strain the power grid more
in fact they sort of still do this today
they're no longer handing out free light
bulbs except in special programs but
they heavily subsidize energy efficient
light bulbs in stores with instant
rebates and many utilities across the
country run similar programs now was
keeping power demand in check their only
goal well that's hard to say among all
the light bulbs in the bag is a 100 watt
ComEd bulb labeled long life so that
pokes a hole in that argument though to
be honest when powered up that thing is
awful bright so I'm not sure how long
lived it actually would be perhaps the
more cynical among you will choose to
believe their free light bulb program
was actually done to pad the power bills
of their rate payers and they were
terrible light bulbs though I think the
kind of bulb they subsidized today
compared to those that they don't points
to the exact opposite conclusion
regardless the broader Point here is
that incandescent light bulbs were cheap
as chips so cheap utilities were willing
to just give them away or run exchange
programs and even at retail prices they
were less than a dollar a piece the
simple fact is the incandescent light
bulb was a consumable good and thus to
me they simply cannot be used as
evidence of planned
obsolescence yes in a very literal sense
their demise is planned after all they
are engineered to fail after a specific
number of
hours but you can't just say that
without knowledging the reasoning behind
it they deliberately traded lifespan for
efficiency and since incandescent light
bulbs aren't very efficient at all to
begin with their operating costs almost
always exceeded the purchase cost anyway
and it was absolutely worth reducing
their lifespan to eek more light out of
them if you wanted a bulb with a longer
lifespan you either needed to sacrifice
efficiency and quality of Light which
almost always cost you more in the end
on your power
or move to an entirely different
lighting technology like fluorescent
lights or high-intensity discharge
lights and those different Technologies
had their own trade-offs too mainly
higher upfront Purchase cost and uh
rather ugly Light quality at least in
the beginning but that's the other thing
those other Technologies existed they
existed and were on the market and
anybody who valued deficiency and or
longevity could decide to install such
light fixtures there was a sea of
options by the 1950s but the good old
tungsten filament lamp remained the
default because it had excellent light
quality was good enough and most
importantly was cheap and despite the
cartel no longer being a thing 1,000
hours remained the efficiency longevity
Sweet Spot Target for most applications
the Centennial light in Livermore
California has burned for so long
because it's barely been burning why
exactly is unclear supposedly it should
burn as a 30 or 60 watt bulb but has
decreased in power over the years for
reasons unknown or perhaps and here's
where my money is it was simply
manufactured incorrectly after all light
bulbs were still handmade back then and
it never burned at the wattages it was
supposed to perhaps that's why Dennis
Bernal donated it to the fire department
it was only bright enough to serve as a
nightlight so that's what it went on to
do anyway the reason isn't important
what is important is that the Centennial
light has spent at least the majority of
its existence as a very bad light bulb
albeit one with notable
longevity but now I need to come up with
some sort of conclusion what exactly is
the point I'm making here well if we
want to get deep I suppose that would be
that the world is complex and you should
be skeptical of simple narratives
nobody's saying that the Feebas cartel
was a wholesome organ organization I'm
certainly not anyway but simply saying
that they made sure light bulbs didn't
last too long leaves out too much of the
story if there were a way to make 2500
hour light bulbs perform like 1,000 hour
light bulbs then sure by all means get
out the pitchforks but that just wasn't
possible I also think that frankly the
incandescent light bulb just doesn't
speak to the spirit of planned
obsolescence at all they were simply one
of many products that got used up over
time when I think of planned
obsolescence I think of something like a
dishwasher car or washing machine a
complex expensive machine that's a major
purchase light bulbs weren't expensive
complex or meant to be durable at least
to my eyes a light bulb has more in
common with say laundry detergent than
it does a washing machine just as that
box of detergent gets used used up and
runs out eventually the light bulb gets
used up and burns out and to really
drive the point home remember that the
cartel dissolved in 1939 yet in the
years that followed that reality didn't
change the arrival of hallogen lamps
which allowed for much hotter filaments
and longer run times thanks to some wild
chemical interactions between tungsten
and iodine or bromine that I won't go
into other than what I just said didn't
even disrupt the practicalities of the
life light bulb all that much
incandescent light bulbs were a
commodity product that had to balance
efficiency lifespan and upfront Purchase
cost for general household use the plain
old 1,000 hour tungsten lamp remained
right in that sweet spot until honestly
quite recently speaking of quite
recently perhaps ironically the light
bulbs of today are now for real actually
becoming plagued with planned
obsolescence or at least lazy
engineering with a heaping spoonful of
cost cutting the arrival of the white
light emitting diode was nothing short
of a game changer to the lighting
industry and has unlocked extremely
efficient and Incredibly long-lived
lighting
Products at least usually I personally
have been very fortunate and can count
on one hand the number of LED bulb
failures I've experienced since 2018 but
sadly there are lots of products out
there especially on the lower end of the
cost Spectrum which have terribly flawed
designs overdriven dodes bad heat sinks
Bargain Basement capacitors or even just
shoddy manufacturing plague far too many
LED lighting Products as anyone who
spent any time around big Clive's
channel would know of course there's
bound to be bad or defective product
designs out there from time to time uh
purple street lights anyone but things
like shoving more current through the
dios than they're designed for just to
eek out that extra bit of light are
inexcusable yet disturbingly prevalent
still beware the pitfalls of your biases
when a supposed 50,000 hour LED bulb
burns out in a year yeah that's probably
going to annoy you but if you're old
enough to remember the days of tungsten
lamps which I realize many of you
watching might not be think back to how
often you used to have to change them I
can remember several times from my
childhood when I went to turn on my
bedroom light and plink it burnt out
with that bright blue Flash and that was
just a single light bulb in a ceiling
fan now that I have dozens of LED lights
all over the house many of which run
automated routines and come on every
night it's pretty amazing that in the
last 5 years I've changed but a
few light bulbs may not be perfect no
but they sure are better
[Music]
to guarantee you'll have to buy another
one before too long that might have been
a perfect take but I want to do it again
though I won't comment on what may or
may not be happening today
but well that was my fault it's
literally just a little bit of glass a
little bit of wire and a little bit of
yeah I picked up the wrong one all
things emit electromagnetic radiation
and as they get hotter they start to
emit rad what the heck just happened
there with the appliance bulb and it
shouldn't be that dim well that's
distracting is keeping power demand in
check there only go now jeez now which
works out to 10 watts so we're seeing oh
crap
[Music]
[Applause]
oh
[Applause]