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The planned obsolescence of incandescent light bulbs is largely a myth. While there are plenty of real examples of planned obsolescence, with incandescent light

The planned obsolescence of incandescent light bulbs is largely a myth. While there are plenty of real examples of planned obsolescence, with incandescent light bulbs there are engineering tradeoffs between longevity and efficiency. Basically, the longer lasting a bulb is, the dimmer and less efficient it is. If you've ever seen any of the supposed 100 year old bulbs, you'll notice that they're extremely dim. Before, during, and after the Phoebus cartel incandescent light bulbs were (and still are!) standardized to 1000 hours. Why? Because that happens to be a good trade off between longevity and efficiency. It just doesn't make sense to waste an extra $5 on electricity to make a $1 light bulb last longer. You have always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs, and still can to this day. They're called rough service bulbs, made for ovens and closets and areas used infrequently. People just never used them for general purpose lighting because they're dim and power hungry. If you read the report by the British monopolies commission quoted in this article, you'll notice that they came to the same conclusion [1]. Pop science articles and Reddit love to bring out the Phoebus cartel over and over as an example of planned obsolescence, but always completely ignore the factors that go into making a good incandescent light bulb. [1]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/235313/0287.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

hilbert42 5y ago
Your arguments notwithstanding, the fact that the Phoebus Cartel essentially operated in secrecy implies that there was more to this than just optimizing (standardizing) incandescent light bulbs to 1000 hours. True, one has always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs and I've done so myself to use in certain industrial situations. However, I'd contend that that has little or nothing to do with planned obsolescence. Moreover, there's more than a whiff of the Phoebus Cartel still about today with light bulb manufacture. Let me give you an example: when compact fluorescent bulbs first came out some four decades ago, I installed many of them. The principal brands I bought were Philips and Wotan and the majority of them lasted well in excess of 10,000 hours. I recall losing track of the life of one low power bulb of ≈8 watts after it had passed 50,000 hours operation (that is, after having being in service for over 25 years and used between 4 and 5 hours per day over this time, eventually it was replaced not because it had failed but rather to replace it with a bulb of higher wattage). Take the current situation: almost every compact fluorescent that I've bought in the last 10 or so years has only lasted about 1000 hours despite the fact that the packets they came in usually advertised their life to be a nominal 8,000 hours or so. The fact is that none of them ever reached anywhere near these published figures. To make matters worse, often these bulbs would break (usually around the base) and sometimes the coiled glass would fall to the floor (no doubt dispensing its small amount of Hg everywhere in the process). Moreover, a while back, so called 'green' environmentally friendly compact fluorescent bulbs were all the rage. They were advertised as having less mercury and thus more environmentally sound. What a joke that turned out to be. All the Greenies loved them because they contained less mercury. Unfortunately, most never knew how the bulbs worked anyway and thus they never realized that reducing their mercury levels below a certain concentration would dramatically reduce the bulb's life to such an extent that the overall result was a net loss for the environment. Right, environmentally friendly bulbs actually had an even shorter service life (hence, Watt for Watt, they produced much more environmental e-waste over the long run)! Clearly, all manufacturers were disingenuous by not stating the consequences of lowering the mercury levels in compact fluorescent bulbs. They deliberately played on the fact that consumers weren't cognizant of the facts, thus the lowering of manufacturing standards was a win for them as there were few complaints. Manufacturers not only made savings by including less mercury but also other manufacturing standards were lowered such as using lower grade capacitors and the maximum working voltages on capacitors and semiconductors were reduced to much closer (lower) tolerances which made these bulbs much more prone to failure from over-voltage spikes, etc. In the end, many more bulbs were consumed than there should have been. Concomitantly, we've ended up with even bigger piles of electronics waste—and the net amount of mercury used was actually higher than it would have been if the bulbs had been designed to have a service life of >10,000 hours (as had been the case some 20 years earlier). Incidentally, the same unacceptable logic is now being applied in the manufacture of normal fluorescent lights† in that current tubes have a much, much shorter lifespan than those made 50 or so years ago). Yep, it wasn't kosher to go around advertising the fact that 'our bulbs have a little more mercury but they will last you many times longer'. Right, manufacturers must have been laughing themselves sick over the fact that they could double-dip their profits by playing on the fact of the public's current, almost irrational, phobia over Element 80 and that reducing the amount of it in bulbs automatically led to vastly increased bulb sales. Moreover, they gloated even more when some governments made compact florescent bulbs mandatory but did not also introduce mandatory manufacturing standards to ensure their long operational life. The overall net effect being bulb manufacturers scoring two wins whilst consumers and the environment both scored nil. Right, the incarnation of the Phoebus Cartel is alive and well. ___ † Several years ago, I was involved in relocating a factory and the old site used T12-type fluorescent tubes the majority of which were made by Crompton Parkinson and were over 50 years old and still in good working condition! We decided not to relocate those old lights and we replace them with new T8-type fluorescents of Eastern manufacture at the new site. These new tubes are now already starting to fail. The lifespan difference between the old and new types is so startling that I reckon it ought to be part of a study into changes into manufacturing techniques. These new tubes have to represent one of the most quintessential examples of planned obsolescence ever. Frankly, it's absolutely outrageous that this can happen.
ineedasername 5y ago
They were still an anti-competitive cartel. The Pheobus Cartel wasn't just about bulb lifespan, but also bulb price. They also used their power to increase the price of bulbs. The fact that they converged on a practical trade-off in terms of life span & energy costs doesn't change their anti-competitive nature.
- klondike_ 5y ago
  I agree with you there, but most people bring up the Phoebus cartel as an example of planned obsolescence and rarely being up the price fixing aspect. Besides, the cartel didn't last for very long regardless.
- jldugger 5y ago
  > The fact that they converged on a practical trade-off Is it even desirable to mass produce at one specific point in the tradeoff curve? Wouldn't society, or at least engineers, appreciate being able to choose where in the curve you land?
  - KSteffensen 5y ago
    Only if the choice is clear and reliable. Right now there seems to be a lot of difference between LED bulb longevity, but it's basically a dice roll if you get a lasting one or not.
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
OTOH, if I could discover a way to make a lightbulb that lasts 1100 hours, for the same electricity and brightness, then consumers would buy that, and I would make money! But the cartel colluded to prevent such innovation. The British monopolies commission effectively colluded with them by first decided that there should be a single lifetime as a standard: with that decision already made, then of course they could easily claim to have reached a decision based on the facts provided by the companies they were investigating. And I would happily pay an extra $5 in electricity for a bulb that reduced my need to change them. Should we ban the iPhone because you could easily use a cheap Android instead?
- Diggsey 5y ago
  As mentioned there's an inverse trade-off between life and brightness, so if you found a way to make an 1100 hours lightbulb, you could equally make a brighter lightbulb than the competition.
  - lowbloodsugar 5y ago
    Except you couldn't, because the cartel has educated customers that 60W = medium brightness, 100W = very bright. Brightness has been linked to electricity use. That also means that you couldn't make a bulb as bright as a 100W bulb that only uses 90 watts: if you advertised it as a 90W bulb, people would think it was less bright.
    - hilbert42 5y ago
      That's now solved by stating the actual light output in lumens as well as the power consumption in Watts (and it should have always been thus). Essentially, every compact fluorescent and LED light bulb I've bought in recent years states both the power consumed and light output (which means that if one bothered one could calculate the overall efficiency of the bulb). Also, for those who still have difficulty with the new specifications, manufacturers state the new bulb's light output to be equivalent to an incandescent of 'x' Watts (i.e.: the light output of say a 20 Watt compact fluorescent ≡ to a 100 Watt incandescent bulb). This is now rather irrelevant where I live as incandescent bulbs have been banned for so long that everyone has forgotten about them.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Closi 5y ago
> Before, during, and after the Phoebus cartel incandescent light bulbs were (and still are!) standardized to 1000 hours. Why? Because that happens to be a good trade off between longevity and efficiency. I would believe this if the cartel fined members based on the inefficiency of their lightbulbs relative to light produced (lumens per watt), and fined according to this. Or allowed longer life bulbs if they met a lumen per watt efficiency target. Or even if they added a minimum life to ensure that consumers got quality, and fined producers if they produced bulbs that were too low-life. They didn't, they fined members who produced lights that lasted longer regardless of bulb efficiency. Because the decision to limit bulb life to 1,000 hours had obvious financial benefits for cartel members, I think it's pretty generous to think that this policy was solely based on wanting what was best for consumers.
- klondike_ 5y ago
  I figure this is because at the time there wasn't an accurate way to measure light output en masse. This was before photoresistors and solar panels were invented. Also, why would manufacturers still target that figure even today in absence of the cartel?
- tlb 5y ago
  Other factors affect light output like frosted glass, which they didn’t want to forbid. Setting a target lifetime seems like a simple way of only regulating the lifetime-efficiency tradeoff while giving freedom on the others.
gwern 5y ago
The IEEE has a good article on how quickly Phoebus failed: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t... If not for Pynchon, no one would have ever heard of Phoebus - it's not even one of the successful cartels. One amusing tidbit not mentioned in the IEEE article I noticed while looking at some congressional testimony: the Scandinavian competitors apparently did not just undercut Phoebus, but signed up first to get Phoebus to bankroll construction of their lightbulb plant and then began undercutting them with it!
- agumonkey 5y ago
  > it's not even one of the successful cartels. which are ?
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    De Beers or OPEC spring to mind.
    - nickff 5y ago
      The effectiveness of OPEC (at least since 1980) is a matter of some debate.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      Somehow I thought De Beers was a monopoly, not a cartel.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

hilbert42 5y ago

Your arguments notwithstanding, the fact that the Phoebus Cartel essentially operated in secrecy implies that there was more to this than just optimizing (standardizing) incandescent light bulbs to 1000 hours. True, one has always been able to buy long life incandescent light bulbs and I've done so myself to use in certain industrial situations. However, I'd contend that that has little or nothing to do with planned obsolescence. Moreover, there's more than a whiff of the Phoebus Cartel still about today with light bulb manufacture. Let me give you an example: when compact fluorescent bulbs first came out some four decades ago, I installed many of them. The principal brands I bought were Philips and Wotan and the majority of them lasted well in excess of 10,000 hours. I recall losing track of the life of one low power bulb of ≈8 watts after it had passed 50,000 hours operation (that is, after having being in service for over 25 years and used between 4 and 5 hours per day over this time, eventually it was replaced not because it had failed but rather to replace it with a bulb of higher wattage). Take the current situation: almost every compact fluorescent that I've bought in the last 10 or so years has only lasted about 1000 hours despite the fact that the packets they came in usually advertised their life to be a nominal 8,000 hours or so. The fact is that none of them ever reached anywhere near these published figures. To make matters worse, often these bulbs would break (usually around the base) and sometimes the coiled glass would fall to the floor (no doubt dispensing its small amount of Hg everywhere in the process). Moreover, a while back, so called 'green' environmentally friendly compact fluorescent bulbs were all the rage. They were advertised as having less mercury and thus more environmentally sound. What a joke that turned out to be. All the Greenies loved them because they contained less mercury. Unfortunately, most never knew how the bulbs worked anyway and thus they never realized that reducing their mercury levels below a certain concentration would dramatically reduce the bulb's life to such an extent that the overall result was a net loss for the environment. Right, environmentally friendly bulbs actually had an even shorter service life (hence, Watt for Watt, they produced much more environmental e-waste over the long run)! Clearly, all manufacturers were disingenuous by not stating the consequences of lowering the mercury levels in compact fluorescent bulbs. They deliberately played on the fact that consumers weren't cognizant of the facts, thus the lowering of manufacturing standards was a win for them as there were few complaints. Manufacturers not only made savings by including less mercury but also other manufacturing standards were lowered such as using lower grade capacitors and the maximum working voltages on capacitors and semiconductors were reduced to much closer (lower) tolerances which made these bulbs much more prone to failure from over-voltage spikes, etc. In the end, many more bulbs were consumed than there should have been. Concomitantly, we've ended up with even bigger piles of electronics waste—and the net amount of mercury used was actually higher than it would have been if the bulbs had been designed to have a service life of >10,000 hours (as had been the case some 20 years earlier). Incidentally, the same unacceptable logic is now being applied in the manufacture of normal fluorescent lights† in that current tubes have a much, much shorter lifespan than those made 50 or so years ago). Yep, it wasn't kosher to go around advertising the fact that 'our bulbs have a little more mercury but they will last you many times longer'. Right, manufacturers must have been laughing themselves sick over the fact that they could double-dip their profits by playing on the fact of the public's current, almost irrational, phobia over Element 80 and that reducing the amount of it in bulbs automatically led to vastly increased bulb sales. Moreover, they gloated even more when some governments made compact florescent bulbs mandatory but did not also introduce mandatory manufacturing standards to ensure their long operational life. The overall net effect being bulb manufacturers scoring two wins whilst consumers and the environment both scored nil. Right, the incarnation of the Phoebus Cartel is alive and well. ___ † Several years ago, I was involved in relocating a factory and the old site used T12-type fluorescent tubes the majority of which were made by Crompton Parkinson and were over 50 years old and still in good working condition! We decided not to relocate those old lights and we replace them with new T8-type fluorescents of Eastern manufacture at the new site. These new tubes are now already starting to fail. The lifespan difference between the old and new types is so startling that I reckon it ought to be part of a study into changes into manufacturing techniques. These new tubes have to represent one of the most quintessential examples of planned obsolescence ever. Frankly, it's absolutely outrageous that this can happen.

ineedasername 5y ago

They were still an anti-competitive cartel. The Pheobus Cartel wasn't just about bulb lifespan, but also bulb price. They also used their power to increase the price of bulbs. The fact that they converged on a practical trade-off in terms of life span & energy costs doesn't change their anti-competitive nature.

klondike_ 5y ago
I agree with you there, but most people bring up the Phoebus cartel as an example of planned obsolescence and rarely being up the price fixing aspect. Besides, the cartel didn't last for very long regardless.
jldugger 5y ago
> The fact that they converged on a practical trade-off Is it even desirable to mass produce at one specific point in the tradeoff curve? Wouldn't society, or at least engineers, appreciate being able to choose where in the curve you land?
- KSteffensen 5y ago
  Only if the choice is clear and reliable. Right now there seems to be a lot of difference between LED bulb longevity, but it's basically a dice roll if you get a lasting one or not.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

OTOH, if I could discover a way to make a lightbulb that lasts 1100 hours, for the same electricity and brightness, then consumers would buy that, and I would make money! But the cartel colluded to prevent such innovation. The British monopolies commission effectively colluded with them by first decided that there should be a single lifetime as a standard: with that decision already made, then of course they could easily claim to have reached a decision based on the facts provided by the companies they were investigating. And I would happily pay an extra $5 in electricity for a bulb that reduced my need to change them. Should we ban the iPhone because you could easily use a cheap Android instead?

Diggsey 5y ago
As mentioned there's an inverse trade-off between life and brightness, so if you found a way to make an 1100 hours lightbulb, you could equally make a brighter lightbulb than the competition.
- lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  Except you couldn't, because the cartel has educated customers that 60W = medium brightness, 100W = very bright. Brightness has been linked to electricity use. That also means that you couldn't make a bulb as bright as a 100W bulb that only uses 90 watts: if you advertised it as a 90W bulb, people would think it was less bright.
  - hilbert42 5y ago
    That's now solved by stating the actual light output in lumens as well as the power consumption in Watts (and it should have always been thus). Essentially, every compact fluorescent and LED light bulb I've bought in recent years states both the power consumed and light output (which means that if one bothered one could calculate the overall efficiency of the bulb). Also, for those who still have difficulty with the new specifications, manufacturers state the new bulb's light output to be equivalent to an incandescent of 'x' Watts (i.e.: the light output of say a 20 Watt compact fluorescent ≡ to a 100 Watt incandescent bulb). This is now rather irrelevant where I live as incandescent bulbs have been banned for so long that everyone has forgotten about them.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Closi 5y ago

> Before, during, and after the Phoebus cartel incandescent light bulbs were (and still are!) standardized to 1000 hours. Why? Because that happens to be a good trade off between longevity and efficiency. I would believe this if the cartel fined members based on the inefficiency of their lightbulbs relative to light produced (lumens per watt), and fined according to this. Or allowed longer life bulbs if they met a lumen per watt efficiency target. Or even if they added a minimum life to ensure that consumers got quality, and fined producers if they produced bulbs that were too low-life. They didn't, they fined members who produced lights that lasted longer regardless of bulb efficiency. Because the decision to limit bulb life to 1,000 hours had obvious financial benefits for cartel members, I think it's pretty generous to think that this policy was solely based on wanting what was best for consumers.

klondike_ 5y ago
I figure this is because at the time there wasn't an accurate way to measure light output en masse. This was before photoresistors and solar panels were invented. Also, why would manufacturers still target that figure even today in absence of the cartel?
tlb 5y ago
Other factors affect light output like frosted glass, which they didn’t want to forbid. Setting a target lifetime seems like a simple way of only regulating the lifetime-efficiency tradeoff while giving freedom on the others.

gwern 5y ago

The IEEE has a good article on how quickly Phoebus failed: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t... If not for Pynchon, no one would have ever heard of Phoebus - it's not even one of the successful cartels. One amusing tidbit not mentioned in the IEEE article I noticed while looking at some congressional testimony: the Scandinavian competitors apparently did not just undercut Phoebus, but signed up first to get Phoebus to bankroll construction of their lightbulb plant and then began undercutting them with it!

agumonkey 5y ago
> it's not even one of the successful cartels. which are ?
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  De Beers or OPEC spring to mind.
  - nickff 5y ago
    The effectiveness of OPEC (at least since 1980) is a matter of some debate.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Somehow I thought De Beers was a monopoly, not a cartel.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]