Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated

So... yeah. And I didn't even get into things like the effects of thermal cycling stress!
Couple of fun facts that didn't make it in: one way to make an "energy-saving long-life" bulb is to design it for 130V, thus when on 120V supplies it's being underrun. And those are very weird because, for instance, it'll often be marked a "60W bulb" - but only at 130V. So in a sense it's like installing a dimmer that you can't go over 85% brightness or so. It works, but you have the same efficiency and output trade-off.
And to touch on that thermal cycling stress, light bulbs for stage lighting were pretty niche and expensive, so stage lighting controllers would often have slow warm-up period upon power-up and never switch lights fully off when a show was going - instead, a very small amount of current was run through the filament to keep it hot, but not hot enough to glow. There were plenty of ways to extend the life of incandescent light bulbs, but every one had its own little unique trade-offs. Be glad we have better tech now!

Sir I only recently found your channel. And I’m ecstatic that I have. My thirst for knowledge is insatiable and you’ve somehow managed to keep me entertained and enlightened more everyday. So thank you 😊

Go and seaech up "Dubai lights" The cartel exists. And they make the products bad on purpose.
Every single dubai light i have bought work after 3 decades. Every single one.

If only I could be so grossly incandescent!

when it comes to "planned obsolence", I love to remind that common fridges were a thing for rich only at a time. Obviously all the systems in it were robust and easily reairable. But thick copper tube cost a lot. So inmodernfridges we only see a thin ones. Yet now it's common to have a fridge in any family. Because less materials = cheaper product. Obviously, those 1/4 ton fridges are more durable, yet they cost too much to be competitive now.

Only took 100 years to dull lol

I like this video and I agree that it probably wasn't some collusion to sell more lightbulbs at the very least not entirely, but like I can live with a dimmer light bulb, in fact in some places in my home I would love it, a dim 60w long lasting bulb in my bathroom with perhaps an additional switch for a much brighter light bulb when cleaning, fricking awesome sounding. But you know... Leds exist now and I grew up a little too late to see the rise of halogen well in the wider world, I live very rurally and it's fairly common to still see cars from the 60s and incandescent light bulbs in homes

Who else had a light bulb moment?
💡
😃

At some point in the past, the wire in my bulb in my desk lamp broke. And I remember being at the hardware store with my dad and I kept nagging him about that Samsung LED bulb.
Well, I forgot which year that was, but that LED is still perfectly fine.

"Kelvin.... degrees" I can hear my chemistry teacher screaming

Heard long ago the life of our first bulbs depended on the small piece of metal (filament) that burned out so quick and would have not burned out that soon if the small piece between the metal holders
was just a tad thicker or stronger. The ten year bulbs! More like ten months. What a joke. As soon as I saw the insides of the ten year bulb I knew, no way! Same tiny piece of metal vibrating between 2 metal pieces. Was not going to last and did not.

I started writing the date of purchase on boxes of LEDs and then writing the date on the actual lightbulbs when putting them in. While it hasn't been 10 years yet, I have already replaced 3 by year 3. I'm looking forward to this video, because I don't have any hope of these thermal printed lightbulb receipts being legible after 5 years, defeating the purpose of a 10 year warranty.

While still behind the "iron curtain'" the east-germans came to industrial conventions in western Europe trying to make sales of long-life light-bulbs at one time and "unbreakable" glassware at another. 🙂 It was NOT successful in either case 😄Thanks for an interesting story. Planned obsolecense is absolutely a large thing.

Very interesting and informative! However, the very fact an appliance light might be designed for a longer runtime shows a weakness in the argument - if some use cases need a light to run longer, presumably because changing the bulb is expensive (due to limited access), this is something that consumers might face too - changing bulbs every 6 months could be a significant maintenance cost in some areas where access to a light is complicated, and the cartel denying consumers access to a suitable light was not to their benefit

This actually did happen with Instant Pot

I mean, they could've just fined on effiency instead and they wouldn't sound so scummy, if someone managed to make a bulb that lasts twice as long but burns just as brightly using the same amount of energy good for them, but saying it's forbidden to make a bulb that lasts more than a 1000 hours regardless of it's efficiency is just rotten.

They don't even sell incondesant bulb anymore where I live, the only legal light shops can sell now are led or neon kinda light

May I add that, even if the brighter shorter life bulbs were more expensive to upkeep, (say the bulbs were more expensive) there would still be plenty of happy customers willing to just straight up pay more for a brighter light. Planned obsolescence is only truly a reasonable accusation when there's clearly no benefit to the customer.

Hey look it’s Eddie Munster!

I have a bulb in my bedroom, it was there when I moved into this place, It still working after 25 years.

One issue that bugs me is we are getting really bad at being sold shit that lasts a short time and then goes into landfill. Household items should be made well, there should be laws against selling rubbish. In the EU they have clamped down on low quality Asian vaccums that lasted a year or so, minimum standards are a way forward. The earth shouldnt be wasted when we can easily do better and have done in the past.

But that would be cwazy. Conspiracy.. from 1789. I got proof

I've spent SO MUCH money replacing LED bulbs that failed after a week to a couple months, or just started making a noise that would drive anyone nuts. The most reliable lighting method I've ever used were the 4ft T8 fluorescents you can barely get anymore.

Do a video on tweed sportcoats

Watching this one again because it hit me, the "Phoebus Cartel"? Is honestly no different from about a thousand different industry standards and certifications today, all designed to ensure that everyone using a standard and printing their standard on a box are doing roughly the same thing and setting the same expectation with consumers. Imagine if you got a Wifi system that promised 802.11AX standard operation, but only operated as an 802.11B router, or worse, just... didn't connect to anything at all. Or getting your hands on some RJ45 crimp heads and realizing all too late that none of them actually fit in standard RJ45 sockets because they were manufactured off spec. It's really no different from any ISO standard, or ANSI standard, or IEEE standard(who were, under the AIEE, a founding member of ANSI, by the way), etc.

ANSI would also previously be referred to as the American Standards Association, which gave us the ASA rating for Film, which itself(alongside DIN, the German system) would be converted into the ISO standard for film. Imagine buying two rolls of film from two different manufacturers, both with the same ISO rating, but both with WILDLY different gain performance. You'd be pretty pissed.

What's interesting is that ANSI's standards aren't nearly as tightly enforced as the Cartel's were, which has led to nothing but trouble for consumers. My previous statement regarding ISO? On digital platforms, not only does it not properly equate to full stops of light gain like it should on many camera bodies, but it also doesn't adhere to any noise gain standard either. The modern ANSI system is basically built on an honor system, and many of the standards ANSI pushes which are built around consumer and workplace safety are basically voluntary, which means that it falls to other agencies to levy fines for more serious infractions, such as when OSHA has to step in and levy fines for safety issues or improperly tested safety equipment that poses a clear and present danger to workers, but the thing is... they don't really DO that for a standard like "This lightbulb doesn't burn bright enough". Which has led to some seriously troubling slips in expectations of what constitutes a GOOD product in America, which itself contributed massively to the Japanese overtaking American manufacturing, with their rigid adherence to standard and their laser-focus on quality and giving 100% to the job every time. And then late stage capitalism kicked in and all that manufacturing went from where the Quality was to where the Cheap was, and now it's all just chinese junk.

Standards MATTER, and business interests in America have made sure that they can't be held to manufacturing standards strictly, because that would cost them too much money, both in quality control and in infractions, so many of them specifically lobbied to ensure that companies wouldn't HAVE to be held to a standard, so much so that a lot of judges have been straight-up bribed to rule in their favor even when civil cases involving injury are brought to bear. A recent case involved someone who, at a restaurant, was eating a boneless wing, and choked on a bone. Reasonable people would say "It's boneless, it's basically a chunk of chicken tender, why is there bone in it", but the judge still ruled that a person cannot expect a boneless wing to not have bones.

Original Enshitification

Also, the idea of an everlasting lightbulb is just absurd if you know... anything about physics, really. Entropy is inescapable, all things will eventually fail given enough time. If someone comes along and invents a lightbulb that truly never burns out... well then, we'd have way more than a lightbulb on our hands.

A good example of planned obselensence is the story of Superfest glass. Beer glass is just regular glass, it breaks when it's dropped. The East-Germans however developed a beer glass that was nearly indestructable and would survive many drops compared to the normal glass. The western companies didn't want it though as it would kill their glass business. If you go to the eastern parts of Germany and visit a bar there, you'll likely still find a Superfest glass in there.

You don't have to be coy, we all know the first practical light bulb was invented by Abraham Lincoln

percussive maintenance is my new term. thank you for that

I love CFL and I love you inconsistent and I love LED and also have legend

⚠️ WARNING ALEC! ⚠️ WARNING!

Every time you defend a loathsome cartel, you get a grey hair. Beware!

In the 90'ies the utilitiy companies in my country were giving away CFL lamps for free to make consumers aware and avoid to expand generation capacity.

so it looks like veritasium has lied to me again

In my house we have an LED bulb die about every 4-5 months, it feels like. Yes we probably are buying cheap LED bulbs, but times are rough and we can't always splurge without taking away from other important necessities.

Late to the party here, but I can definitely say that LEDs, even with the flaws mentioned of poor quality control in those marketed to the average consumer, have ridiculous life spans, the lighting display in my store has more bulbs in that singular display, than most homes, and they are all on for approximately 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and we typically see 1 or 2 bulb failures a month. Without going and getting a head count there's about 50 bulbs on the display, and assuming the approximate one failure a month we see (i don't keep rigorous notes on it) that's about 1 failure in every 16,800 hours of use.

i changed all my lightbulbs to incandescent from LED....the light is so much better especially in the bathroom. looks fantastic ^_^

The story of the motorcycle industry...looks a at the vincent motorcycle

Great to see stock footage of a BMW timing chain job when talking about planned obsolescence

5/8 of the Philips LED lights i bought 2 years ago show defects or have broken entirely by now, funnily enough

The biggest source of planned obsolescence is closed source software in the device that cannot be upgraded and is no longer safe to use when everything is now smart/vulnerable and connected to internet.

You are wrong. Long lasting bulbs were possible but corporations did not want them thus they came to agreement to never use bulb life as part of the competition with each other.

But i understand your motivation and animus and where it comes from.

The led bulbs we use at my job are remarkably short lived for led bulbs. I know it's because they're cheap chinese trash bulbs though.

I heard stockings are a good example of planned obsolescence.

Carbon has the highest melting point of any element. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal. That’s why they handle molten tungsten in graphite crucibles.

Oh wow, you can still buy incandescents?
We only got LEDs nowadays here

sooo... the lightbulb manufacturers were so concerned with making a bright and energy efficient lightbulb that they forcefully decreased the lifespan? Do you see how that doesn't make sense? That's like limiting the battery size of a phone because it'll make it charge slower. If the cartel was actually intent on benefitting consumers, they would have set minimum brightness and efficiency requirements, and not maximum lifetime. If the cartel was still in place, leds would never have been made.
In addition, don't you think consumers should get the choice of what kind of trade-offs they want?

My sense is that I probably don’t agree with his politics, but I very much admire how he is fair and critical, even when it would seem it, possibly goes against his political beliefs

Anyway, in general, the lifespan of a product is engineered either way, and claiming that engineering for anything other than infinite fail criteria to be malicious would be foolish