The light bulb that has brightened the fire-department garage in Livermore, California, for the past hundred and fifteen years will not burn out. Instead, it will “expire.” When it does, it certainly won’t be thrown out. It will be “laid to rest.”
“You have to use the correct terminology,” Tom Bramell, a retired deputy fire chief who has become the Livermore light’s leading historian, told me. The bulb has been on almost continuously since 1901, he said; in 2015, it surpassed a million hours in service, making it, according to Guinness World Records, the longest-burning in the world.
Bramell so cuts the figure of a firefighter that he has smoke-colored eyes and hair, and a permanent hack from smoke inhalation (“I do a bag of cough drops a day”). His circumlocution around the bulb’s eventual, inevitable end reflects the reverence in which it is held by Livermoreans and its more far-flung fans, who keep vigil over the light online. The bulb, he said, has outlived three webcams so far. It was manufactured sometime around 1900 by Shelby Electric, of Ohio, using a design by the French-American inventor Adolphe Chaillet. Its essential makeup is something of a mystery, because it is hard to dissect a light that is always on. (Shelby bulbs of the same vintage have been studied, but the company was experimenting with a variety of designs at the time.) What’s known for sure about the Livermore bulb is that it has a carbon filament of about the same human-hair thickness as the ones, typically made of tungsten, that are found in modern bulbs. It was made to be a sixty-watt bulb, though it currently illuminates the Fire Department Station 6 garage with only about the brightness of a nightlight.
More intriguingly, the light bulb is of the incandescent variety—the same type that many consumers now revile for its short life span. Had you plugged in a typical drugstore incandescent on January 1st of this year and left it on full time, it would likely have died by around February 12th. These bulbs commonly burn for about a thousand hours, or approximately half as long as the average bulb did in the early nineteen-twenties. “We don’t build things today to last,” Bramell said—speaking for, I would guess, almost all of us.
That truism has lately come into question, however, thanks to the widespread adoption of durable, light-emitting-diode light bulbs. L.E.D.s use semiconductor technology to achieve long life spans—bulbs that promise a fifty-thousand-hour design life are not uncommon. Current penetration in the consumer-lamps market (as the bulb business is known) is seven per cent worldwide, and is expected by lighting analysts to reach fifty per cent by around 2022. In the first quarter of 2016, according to the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, L.E.D.-lamp shipments in the U.S. were up three hundred and seventy-five per cent over last year, taking more than a quarter of the market for the first time in history.
This would seem to be a good thing, but building bulbs to last turns out to pose a vexing problem: no one seems to have a sound business model for such a product. And, paradoxically, this is the very problem that the short life span of modern incandescents was meant to solve.
The thousand-hour life span of the modern incandescent dates to 1924, when representatives from the world’s largest lighting companies—including such familiar names as Philips, Osram, and General Electric (which took over Shelby Electric circa 1912)—met in Switzerland to form Phoebus, arguably the first cartel with global reach. The bulbs’ life spans had by then increased to the point that they were causing what one senior member of the group described as a “mire” in sales turnover. And so, one of its priorities was to depress lamp life, to a thousand-hour standard. The effort is today considered one of the earliest examples of planned obsolescence at an industrial scale.
When the new bulbs started coming out, Phoebus members rationalized the shorter design life as an effort to establish a quality standard of brighter and more energy-efficient bulbs. But Markus Krajewski, a media-studies professor at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, who has researched Phoebus’s records, told me that the only significant technical innovation in the new bulbs was the precipitous drop in operating life. “It was the explicit aim of the cartel to reduce the life span of the lamps in order to increase sales,” he said. “Economics, not physics.”
Phoebus is easily cast as a conspiracy of big-business evildoers. It even makes an appearance as such in Thomas Pynchon’s weird-lit classic “Gravity’s Rainbow”: the shadowy organization sends an agent in asbestos gloves and seven-inch heels to seize diehard bulbs as they approach their thousandth hour of service. (“Phoebus discovered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin,” Pynchon writes.) In its day, however, the shift to planned obsolescence was in keeping with the views of a growing body of economists and businesspeople who felt that, unless you dealt in coffins, it was bad business and unsound economics to sell a person any product only once. By the late nineteen-twenties, the repetitive-sales model had become so popular that Paul Mazur, a partner at Lehman Brothers, declared obsolescence the “new god” of the American business élite.
Giles Slade, in his book “Made to Break,” traces the term “planned obsolescence” to a 1932 pamphlet, circulated in New York, titled “Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence.” The term gained currency in 1936, through a similarly themed essay in Printer’s Ink, “Outmoded Durability: If Merchandise Does Not Wear Out Faster, Factories Will Be Idle, People Unemployed.”
This Depression-era argument, which one marketing writer of the era summed up as a “sound and genuine philosophy in free spending and wasting,” became the foundation of the modern consumer economy, so much so that we heard it again during the Great Recession, in 2007, when prominent political leaders suggested that shopping presented a solution to the crisis. The prospect of repetitive consumption is now built into almost everything we buy, and obsolescence has become, as Slade puts it, “a touchstone of the American consciousness.”
With the advent of L.E.D. bulbs, we now have perhaps the first mass-consumer product of the twenty-first century to challenge planned obsolescence. After a long technological incubation, L.E.D.s surpassed the energy efficiency of comparably bright incandescent lighting in the nineteen-nineties. Today, hardware-store-variety L.E.D. bulbs are commonly advertised at a twenty-five-thousand-hour design life, which is also the benchmark for federal Energy Star labelling; after that length of time they will have lost more than thirty per cent of their brightness. Plug one in on January 1st and it will wane by about May 15th the following year. Under more ordinary usage—each of the sixty-seven bulbs in a typical American household is turned on for an average of only 1.6 hours daily—it would, in theory, at least, stay bright for more than forty-two years. Incentives for the purchase of L.E.D.s are now offered in forty-eight states, and the U.S. Department of Energy considers the widespread adoption of the technology to offer the greatest potential impact on energy conservation in the country.
But does their increased prominence mean that, sometime between the Phoebus cartel and now, we found the business model for stuff that lasts? “That’s the billion-dollar question,” Fabian Hoelzenbein, a London-based lighting market analyst, told me.
The lighting industry has a term, “socket saturation,” that describes the point at which enough short-lived incandescent bulbs have been replaced by durable L.E.D. bulbs that light-bulb sales as a whole begin to decline. Market-analysis firms such as I.H.S. Technology and Strategies Unlimited predict that socket saturation will be felt across the global market in 2019. Parts of Asia, including China, may already be feeling the effect.
Although the lamps market will bring in an estimated thirty-eight billion dollars this year, L.E.D.-bulb makers are already reacting to the spectre of declining sales. One response, echoing the path of incandescents, is the emergence of cheaper bulbs with shorter life spans. Last year, for example, the lighting-industry giant Philips introduced a sixty-watt, ten-thousand-hour L.E.D. that sells for five dollars. But a profusion of new manufacturers, most of them in Asia, has driven cost and quality much lower than that. (California is the only state in the federation with a minimum-longevity standard for L.E.D. lamps—ten thousand hours, effective January 1, 2018.) “You can buy bulbs on eBay that are of such low quality that, when you screw them in, you can actually get a shock,” Hoelzenbein said. He’s heard reports from China of people buying bargain L.E.D. light bulbs by the kilogram, knowing some would last and others might not work at all.
A second approach is to get out of the lamps market altogether. At the end of May, Philips spun off Philips Lighting into a stand-alone company, acknowledging in the I.P.O. documents that the traditional lamps market will decline. Germany’s Osram—another of the world’s biggest lighting brands—has also calved off its two-billion-dollar lighting business to form an independent company, Ledvance, which is now for sale. And last October, G.E., the company founded by Edison, made a similar move, breaking up G.E. Lighting to leave behind a rump firm—the light-bulb division, essentially—that would be easy to sell off.
Watching companies that have been selling bulbs since before the Phoebus cartel turn their backs on the light-bulb business is startling, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re getting out of lighting entirely. Instead, a more sophisticated L.E.D. industry is under development, focussed on placing L.E.D.s in products where obsolescence remains the rule of the day, and on expanding the ways that lighting is used. Osram will continue to provide L.E.D. components, for example, in sectors such as the automotive and electronics industries. And while G.E. appears set to leave residential lighting behind, it will continue to develop its commercial-scale L.E.D. business with “smart” products, such as streetlights that alert authorities whenever a built-in sensor detects gunshots in the area.
Smart lighting is buzzy in the household market as well. Philips was a pioneer here, with Hue, a system it introduced in 2012 that allows you to, for example, gradually brighten your room to wake you up or set off explosions of light to accompany your gaming, drawing on a palette of (allegedly) sixteen million colors. The newly independent Philips Lighting is planning to use earnings from the declining lamps market to fund further innovation in smart-lighting systems. Sony’s recently released Multifunctional Light, meanwhile, turns fixtures into a locus for the Internet of Things, connecting to speakers, security systems, and other devices. Oh, and it also lights up a room.
“Lighting is the perfect medium for you to insert the other connectivity products to fill the house, because you use light everywhere,” Philip Smallwood, the director of L.E.D. and lighting research for Silicon Valley-based Strategies Unlimited, told me. He compared the direction that smart lighting is headed to the technological revolution that saw telephones turn into multitasking security blankets of connectedness.
But smart phones are also paramount symbols of product obsolescence—easy to break (though this wasn’t always the case), hard to repair, and constantly being updated. A study in Europe found that the average person disposes of his smart phone after 2.7 years, a service life barely longer than that of T-shirts or flip-flops. If the business model for L.E.D.s shifts toward mass-market bulbs of lower price and life span alongside “lightified products” that are subject to digital-age upgrade cycles, then the technology’s potentially radical challenge to repetitive consumption will—like the long-lasting incandescent bulb—end up being comfortably absorbed by consumer culture.
All of this would amount to little more than a business-school case study of history quirkily repeating itself, if it weren’t for the fact that finding an economic model for products that last is increasingly seen as critical to environmental sustainability.
“My starting point is, get the economics right,” Tim Cooper, a design professor who heads the sustainable-consumption research group at Nottingham Trent University, told me. It’s already possible to buy durable products, he said—Miele washing machines, Vitsoe shelving, Jaguar cars. But, because such products command premium prices, they remain niche goods; by Cooper’s estimate they make up less than five per cent of the market. To truly change a light bulb will require policy changes—whether regulatory, market-based, or voluntary within industries—that support longer product lifetimes.
In a 2010 book that he edited, “Longer Lasting Products,” Cooper suggests possible ways to accomplish this: Minimum standards of durability, repairability, and upgradeability. A decrease in taxes on labor and an increase on energy and raw materials, to help make it cheaper to repair or recondition things and more expensive to make new ones. Sales-tax rates based on product lifetimes. Longer consumer guarantees and warranties. Labelling programs or rating schemes that let consumers know how long stuff will last.
The economic model to aim for, Cooper said, is founded on people buying fewer, but better, products, and paying more across those products’ lifetimes. The manufacture of quality goods would employ more people, and the goods would sell at higher prices. A dramatic expansion of the repair-and-servicing sector, the secondhand market, and the sharing economy would provide additional levels of commercial activity. And while consumers would likely end up spending less money on stuff over all, that would free up income for services and investment.
Such visions date back at least to 1982, when an O.E.C.D. report urged governments to address the volume of solid waste by encouraging more durable products, but they remain little studied or implemented. Almost thirty-five years later, Cooper, who has been researching product durability since the early nineties, couldn’t name any instances when national governments or world bodies implemented policies to promote longer life spans. (I wrote about outdoor retailer Patagonia’s seemingly incongruous attempt to address consumerism last year.) Politically speaking, the reason is obvious: even advocates such as Cooper describe the transformation of a consumer economy fuelled by obsolescence as a “radical, systemic change” that is likely, at least in the short term, to slow economic growth. “This may be unacceptable to governments, which use economic growth as their primary performance indicator,” Cooper notes, rather dryly, in “Longer Lasting Products.”
The first international academic conference on product durability took place last year, in Nottingham, England; also in 2015, a consortium of environmental organizations, ranging from the California-based repair wiki iFixit to European government agencies, issued a joint call for longer-lasting goods. Sustainability thinkers increasingly recognize that the efforts of industrialized nations to “decouple” economic growth from its environmental impacts have not succeeded. Despite a conspicuous boom in energy-efficient, recyclable, biodegradable, and nontoxic products on the market, resource exploitation continues to intensify—the footprint of annual global consumption now exceeds the replacement rate of the planet’s resources by one and a half times. (It would be four times if everyone on Earth consumed like the average American.) Perpetual, consumer-driven growth has proven staggeringly difficult to disentangle from impacts like pollution, resource depletion, energy consumption, and waste. Even purchasing eco-friendly products quickly becomes a zero-sum green game if we constantly buy more of them.
“We’re at the start of the policy process, but it’s looking quite promising,” Cooper said. “For many years I was a bit on my own.” The most important change that he advocates might also be the most difficult: a culture shift away from the pursuit of novelty, disposability, short-term value, and du jour fashion and technology. “What drives the throwaway culture? Well, often people want to have the newest and the latest,” he said. “But there are people who want to have the oldest and the best.”
The Livermore light is cosseted and cloistered today, dangling almost sixteen feet off the floor of the fire-station garage. But that wasn’t always the case. Sitting in Sanctuary Ultra Lounge, the bar that now operates out of the former fire hall on Livermore’s main street, Bramell recalled the days when the bulb hung over a workbench and whole crews would slap it—“bong!”—for good luck as they headed out on calls.
Today, every Livermore firefighter learns the tale of the bulb’s origin as part of crew orientation, which has given them a better-than-average appreciation for the tension between product lifetimes and the modern consumer economy. “It’s common sense to us that manufacturers have to put a finite life on products,” Bramell told me. “You wish at the same time that you’d have a product that would last forever.”
