10 ms·

Livermore's centennial light, the world's longest-burning light bulb

51 points by tentacleuno 5y ago

moab 5y ago
Obligatory on the topic of long-burning bulbs: https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html
- pokler 5y ago
  It seems weird that Thomas Pynchon's name is nowhere to be found on this page or any other context about the source of this story (its from Gravity's Rainbow). There are also spelling errors.
mattowen_uk 5y ago
As it's not directly explained on the link, I'll ask here... How/Why is it still burning? I have light bulbs in my house that blow after only a few months use, and normally only blow when I turn them on, if this bulb was power cycled, would it blow?
- dvh 5y ago
  Every time you increase temperature by 10 degree, it shorten the lifespan of electric device by 50%. If you run device that was meant to run at 4600°C at 600°C, well you do the math...
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Modern lightbulbs use thinner filaments that are substantially more efficient than the thick one used in this bulb, but they don't last as long. Further, this particular bulb never gets turn off and back on again which I'm led to believe causes wear. If it were turned off and back on it would likely be fine. Always a fun segue into the Phoebus Cartel [1] which pushed for shorter lifespans for bulbs - including by mandating thinner filaments. They did it to keep people on the treadmill but it was actually a substantial improvement in energy efficiency. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
  - edb_123 5y ago
    I also do think that the filament thickness has a lot to say for longevity. I have a "decor type" large warm glowing light bulb with a quite thick and long filament that's been on for hours daily and turned on and off multiple times daily for 10 years now and counting. And yes, it is a real incandescent bulb, not LED :)
    - CelestialTeapot 5y ago
      The same game is still played today with LED bulbs (whether there's a cartel behind it or not, I do not pretend to know). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
- kbutler 5y ago
  Some factors: - low voltage (below spec) - constant on, instead of cycling - strong element - backup power - generally a protected environment
- thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  Incandescent light bulbs have a trade-off between brightness and longevity. This bulb specifically appears to be running at a fraction of its original designed brightness. https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/tests-shine-light-on-the-secret-of-the-livermore-light-bulb/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/tests-shine-light-on-...
- biggieshellz 5y ago
  The carbon filament has gotten thin enough that it runs at a lower temperature and doesn't draw much current (or produce as many lumens), so it doesn't wear out as quickly.
- longwave 5y ago
  The bulb was accidentally off for nine hours in May 2013 due to a faulty UPS - originally installed to ensure the bulb would not go out in the case of a power failure - but fortunately it did not blow when power was restored.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  Besides the other great answers, there's also survivorship bias. This bulb wasn't necessarily designed to last a hundred years. It's just an outlier that has lasted that long. We wouldn't give a shit about it had it burned out fifty years ago. We don't talk about other bulbs (today) that lasted fifty years even though that's an extremely impressive number itself. If the Internet was around fifty years ago we might have half a dozen webcams pointing to the "Half Century Bulbs" and being fascinated with them lasting fifty years and wondering if any will get to a hundred years.
  - jbay808 5y ago
    "Survivorship bias" is a favourite go-to for contrarians, but it's not a strong effect and when you see something surprising way out at the tail end of a distribution, attributing it to survivorship bias is a lost opportunity to learn something important. When something survives 2x longer than expected, it might be survivorship bias. When it survives 10x, 100x, or 1000x longer than expected, you should probably look closer and see what material or operational differences might be responsible, because there's going to be something worth learning. Even if what you learn is just that any incandescent lightbulb can have a greatly extended life if you run it at below-spec brightness.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      When you have an outlier like this bulb you can't make any good statistical judgements about it unless it was part of a controlled experiment. This bulb is a sample size of one. We might roughly know some details about its original construction and early operational life but not enough to really draw conclusions from. The only way to get more details about it will be a postmortem examination of its physical qualities. Due to its age we have little knowledge of its specific construction details. Were the factory specs followed exactly (or even recorded) or was some of the fabrication machinery tuned by the operator? Did this bulb end up with thicker than normal glass or filament? What was the mortality rate of other bulbs in its batch? Does the fire station have better (or worse) than typical wiring? Did it have bad wiring early in the bulb's life to unintentionally under-load it? Sometimes extreme outliers are just extreme outliers. A postmortem examination of the bulb might tell you it had a manufacturing defect giving it thicker than typical filament that combined with babying it for the past 50 years extended its life. Sorry it's not just being contrarian. Outliers are outliers. Just because something is an outlier in a distribution doesn't automatically mean there's some hidden truth of the universe to be revealed.
- devindotcom 5y ago
  As I understand it the issue with ordinary incandescents is that the alternating heat and cold from being used eventually causes the glue attaching the glass to the metal part to crack, which lets air into the bulb (ordinarily a vacuum/inert gas). The next time you turn it on, the air causes the filament to burn, causing the characteristic flare-up and scorch.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    Er, that glue only holds the glass bulb in the socket. The atmosphere contained within is completely glass sealed. What happens is the filament sputters away (like evaporation) and becomes thinner over time. It eventually becomes so thin it breaks from thermal shock when turned on. The dark spot on dead bulbs in the evaporated tungsten. Fun fact: In theater a blown bulb can ruin a production so some of the more critical lamps are dimmed instead of power cycled to avoid blowing a lamp.
    - devindotcom 5y ago
      Really? I was under the impression that the glass isn't a fully enclosed "bulb" so to speak, but is cut off at one end to accommodate the rest of the necessary hardware, and glue completes the seal. Perhaps you're right. I can't seem to find a diagram or anything that shows this, though.
      - MisterTea 5y ago
        If you examine a clear incandescent bulb, you will see that the support for the filament is hollow and has a tube inside extending down. This little "straw" is the point of connection for evacuation where the air is removed and then back-filled with argon. The argon coaxes the tungsten back onto the filament preventing rapid sputtering which would happen in a pure vacuum. After the argon the little tube is heated until it hits melting point and crimped off for a near perfect hermetic seal. The argon pressure is still well below atmosphere so the bulb is still considered under "vacuum" compared to atmosphere.
      - xenadu02 5y ago
- ars 5y ago
  The simple reason is that it's not a light bulb, it's a heater. They are running it at much lower than specified voltage, so are generating mostly heat, and almost no light, so the filament is not very hot. It's glowing a dull red, not white. There is a quadratic relationship between temperature; and efficiency plus bulb life. You may have heard of the phoebus cartel - they specified a specific bulb life, which directly translates into a particular energy efficiency. There's nothing about the manufacture of the bulb that they casued to be worse, rather if the bulb lasts too long, you just up the temperature and make a more efficient bulb (uses less electricity). You can buy stage bulbs that last barely 10 hours, and run extremely hot, and also efficient, and for film that is the tradeoff they prefer (I guess they need a lot of light, and they don't really keep bulbs for long).
LeoPanthera 5y ago
See also: The Oxford Electric Bell, which has "rung" continuously since 1840 on the same set of batteries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell I used to work in the same building as it. You can't actually hear it ringing, it's extremely quiet anyway and it's behind two layers of glass. I made a video of it ringing way back in 2011: https://youtu.be/1Dx1-f8xQio https://youtu.be/1Dx1-f8xQio
- kragen 5y ago
  I really appreciate your video. Thank you for posting it.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Clicked on YouTube link, realized we've met in real life. First time that's happened to me on HN.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    I have no idea who you are. But hi. I no longer live in Oxford. Or the UK. :)
TruthWillHurt 5y ago
Before the invention of planned obsolescence...
- GuB-42 5y ago
  It also now has an efficiency of 0.05 lm/watt, 200 times less than a standard "planned obsolescence" tungsten filament light bulb and 3000 times less than a modern LED bulb. Planned obsolescence is a thing, but it is often a trade-off, not just companies being evil. By making things less durable, you can also make them cheaper, lighter, more efficient,... You also have to take technological progress into account. Your old dishwasher may last for 50+ years but it is heavy, loud, wastes water and electricity... So you may prefer a cheaper dishwasher that only lasts 10 years because you may want to change it later anyways because the energy savings of a new one can make keeping the old one not worth it. There are cases of planned obsolescence that are, in my opinion, inexcusable (looking at you smartphone manufacturers) but lightbulb longevity is a worthwhile trade-off.
kej 5y ago
The Livermore bulb only has a small part, but this reminded me of the story 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future [0]. It's a fun science fiction story that is also a great example of web storytelling. [0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
- kibwen 5y ago
  17776 is the most important speculative fiction that I've read in the past decade. Don't be turned off by the eye-melting lo-fi hypermedia aesthetic, or the fact that the framing narrative is ostensibly about football, hosted on a sports website, and written by a sportswriter (all of whose work is brilliant, BTW, even if you don't follow sports). As absurdly silly as the premise is, it's quietly a thought-provoking treatment on how humans adapt to post-scarcity and utopia, and changed how I view the human relationship to modern video games. There's also (the first half of) a sequel, 20020: https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020/ https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020/
- kingcharles 5y ago
  WTF. I DON'T EVEN. I have no idea what I just experienced. My PC fan spooled up to max speed when I clicked on the link and everything went all 2001 Entering The Monolith on me. I panicked, but I stuck with it.
- mlok 5y ago
  Wow !! This is amazing. My last comment on HN was 5 days ago when I threw a bottle to the sea for a website I saw years ago : a story told in a calendar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29009014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29009014 And there it is !!! I find it again here thanks to you and your comment. (I was not much interested in this story so I was about to leave and I just had a quick look at the first comment : yours) This is an incredible luck ! Thank you very much !
th0ma5 5y ago
Made in my hometown of Shelby, Ohio.
dang 5y ago
Some past threads. Others? Centennial Light - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427081 - July 2019 (20 comments) This Light Bulb has been burning for 110 Years straight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749576 - Dec 2014 (1 comment) The Centennial Light, a bulb that's reportedly been burning for 113 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353200 - Sept 2014 (29 comments) The lightbulb that's been burning for almost 110 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2642483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2642483 - June 2011 (9 comments)

51 points by tentacleuno 5y ago

moab 5y ago

Obligatory on the topic of long-burning bulbs: https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html

pokler 5y ago
It seems weird that Thomas Pynchon's name is nowhere to be found on this page or any other context about the source of this story (its from Gravity's Rainbow). There are also spelling errors.

mattowen_uk 5y ago

As it's not directly explained on the link, I'll ask here... How/Why is it still burning? I have light bulbs in my house that blow after only a few months use, and normally only blow when I turn them on, if this bulb was power cycled, would it blow?

dvh 5y ago
Every time you increase temperature by 10 degree, it shorten the lifespan of electric device by 50%. If you run device that was meant to run at 4600°C at 600°C, well you do the math...
arcticbull 5y ago
Modern lightbulbs use thinner filaments that are substantially more efficient than the thick one used in this bulb, but they don't last as long. Further, this particular bulb never gets turn off and back on again which I'm led to believe causes wear. If it were turned off and back on it would likely be fine. Always a fun segue into the Phoebus Cartel [1] which pushed for shorter lifespans for bulbs - including by mandating thinner filaments. They did it to keep people on the treadmill but it was actually a substantial improvement in energy efficiency. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
- edb_123 5y ago
  I also do think that the filament thickness has a lot to say for longevity. I have a "decor type" large warm glowing light bulb with a quite thick and long filament that's been on for hours daily and turned on and off multiple times daily for 10 years now and counting. And yes, it is a real incandescent bulb, not LED :)
  - CelestialTeapot 5y ago
    The same game is still played today with LED bulbs (whether there's a cartel behind it or not, I do not pretend to know). See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
kbutler 5y ago
Some factors: - low voltage (below spec) - constant on, instead of cycling - strong element - backup power - generally a protected environment
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
Incandescent light bulbs have a trade-off between brightness and longevity. This bulb specifically appears to be running at a fraction of its original designed brightness. https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/tests-shine-light-on-the-secret-of-the-livermore-light-bulb/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/tests-shine-light-on-...
biggieshellz 5y ago
The carbon filament has gotten thin enough that it runs at a lower temperature and doesn't draw much current (or produce as many lumens), so it doesn't wear out as quickly.
longwave 5y ago
The bulb was accidentally off for nine hours in May 2013 due to a faulty UPS - originally installed to ensure the bulb would not go out in the case of a power failure - but fortunately it did not blow when power was restored.
giantrobot 5y ago
Besides the other great answers, there's also survivorship bias. This bulb wasn't necessarily designed to last a hundred years. It's just an outlier that has lasted that long. We wouldn't give a shit about it had it burned out fifty years ago. We don't talk about other bulbs (today) that lasted fifty years even though that's an extremely impressive number itself. If the Internet was around fifty years ago we might have half a dozen webcams pointing to the "Half Century Bulbs" and being fascinated with them lasting fifty years and wondering if any will get to a hundred years.
- jbay808 5y ago
  "Survivorship bias" is a favourite go-to for contrarians, but it's not a strong effect and when you see something surprising way out at the tail end of a distribution, attributing it to survivorship bias is a lost opportunity to learn something important. When something survives 2x longer than expected, it might be survivorship bias. When it survives 10x, 100x, or 1000x longer than expected, you should probably look closer and see what material or operational differences might be responsible, because there's going to be something worth learning. Even if what you learn is just that any incandescent lightbulb can have a greatly extended life if you run it at below-spec brightness.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    When you have an outlier like this bulb you can't make any good statistical judgements about it unless it was part of a controlled experiment. This bulb is a sample size of one. We might roughly know some details about its original construction and early operational life but not enough to really draw conclusions from. The only way to get more details about it will be a postmortem examination of its physical qualities. Due to its age we have little knowledge of its specific construction details. Were the factory specs followed exactly (or even recorded) or was some of the fabrication machinery tuned by the operator? Did this bulb end up with thicker than normal glass or filament? What was the mortality rate of other bulbs in its batch? Does the fire station have better (or worse) than typical wiring? Did it have bad wiring early in the bulb's life to unintentionally under-load it? Sometimes extreme outliers are just extreme outliers. A postmortem examination of the bulb might tell you it had a manufacturing defect giving it thicker than typical filament that combined with babying it for the past 50 years extended its life. Sorry it's not just being contrarian. Outliers are outliers. Just because something is an outlier in a distribution doesn't automatically mean there's some hidden truth of the universe to be revealed.
devindotcom 5y ago
As I understand it the issue with ordinary incandescents is that the alternating heat and cold from being used eventually causes the glue attaching the glass to the metal part to crack, which lets air into the bulb (ordinarily a vacuum/inert gas). The next time you turn it on, the air causes the filament to burn, causing the characteristic flare-up and scorch.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  Er, that glue only holds the glass bulb in the socket. The atmosphere contained within is completely glass sealed. What happens is the filament sputters away (like evaporation) and becomes thinner over time. It eventually becomes so thin it breaks from thermal shock when turned on. The dark spot on dead bulbs in the evaporated tungsten. Fun fact: In theater a blown bulb can ruin a production so some of the more critical lamps are dimmed instead of power cycled to avoid blowing a lamp.
  - devindotcom 5y ago
    Really? I was under the impression that the glass isn't a fully enclosed "bulb" so to speak, but is cut off at one end to accommodate the rest of the necessary hardware, and glue completes the seal. Perhaps you're right. I can't seem to find a diagram or anything that shows this, though.
    - MisterTea 5y ago
      If you examine a clear incandescent bulb, you will see that the support for the filament is hollow and has a tube inside extending down. This little "straw" is the point of connection for evacuation where the air is removed and then back-filled with argon. The argon coaxes the tungsten back onto the filament preventing rapid sputtering which would happen in a pure vacuum. After the argon the little tube is heated until it hits melting point and crimped off for a near perfect hermetic seal. The argon pressure is still well below atmosphere so the bulb is still considered under "vacuum" compared to atmosphere.
    - xenadu02 5y ago
ars 5y ago
The simple reason is that it's not a light bulb, it's a heater. They are running it at much lower than specified voltage, so are generating mostly heat, and almost no light, so the filament is not very hot. It's glowing a dull red, not white. There is a quadratic relationship between temperature; and efficiency plus bulb life. You may have heard of the phoebus cartel - they specified a specific bulb life, which directly translates into a particular energy efficiency. There's nothing about the manufacture of the bulb that they casued to be worse, rather if the bulb lasts too long, you just up the temperature and make a more efficient bulb (uses less electricity). You can buy stage bulbs that last barely 10 hours, and run extremely hot, and also efficient, and for film that is the tradeoff they prefer (I guess they need a lot of light, and they don't really keep bulbs for long).

LeoPanthera 5y ago

See also: The Oxford Electric Bell, which has "rung" continuously since 1840 on the same set of batteries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell I used to work in the same building as it. You can't actually hear it ringing, it's extremely quiet anyway and it's behind two layers of glass. I made a video of it ringing way back in 2011: https://youtu.be/1Dx1-f8xQio https://youtu.be/1Dx1-f8xQio

kragen 5y ago
I really appreciate your video. Thank you for posting it.
kingcharles 5y ago
Clicked on YouTube link, realized we've met in real life. First time that's happened to me on HN.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  I have no idea who you are. But hi. I no longer live in Oxford. Or the UK. :)

TruthWillHurt 5y ago

Before the invention of planned obsolescence...

GuB-42 5y ago
It also now has an efficiency of 0.05 lm/watt, 200 times less than a standard "planned obsolescence" tungsten filament light bulb and 3000 times less than a modern LED bulb. Planned obsolescence is a thing, but it is often a trade-off, not just companies being evil. By making things less durable, you can also make them cheaper, lighter, more efficient,... You also have to take technological progress into account. Your old dishwasher may last for 50+ years but it is heavy, loud, wastes water and electricity... So you may prefer a cheaper dishwasher that only lasts 10 years because you may want to change it later anyways because the energy savings of a new one can make keeping the old one not worth it. There are cases of planned obsolescence that are, in my opinion, inexcusable (looking at you smartphone manufacturers) but lightbulb longevity is a worthwhile trade-off.

kej 5y ago

The Livermore bulb only has a small part, but this reminded me of the story 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future [0]. It's a fun science fiction story that is also a great example of web storytelling. [0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

kibwen 5y ago
17776 is the most important speculative fiction that I've read in the past decade. Don't be turned off by the eye-melting lo-fi hypermedia aesthetic, or the fact that the framing narrative is ostensibly about football, hosted on a sports website, and written by a sportswriter (all of whose work is brilliant, BTW, even if you don't follow sports). As absurdly silly as the premise is, it's quietly a thought-provoking treatment on how humans adapt to post-scarcity and utopia, and changed how I view the human relationship to modern video games. There's also (the first half of) a sequel, 20020: https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020/ https://www.sbnation.com/secret-base/21410129/20020/
kingcharles 5y ago
WTF. I DON'T EVEN. I have no idea what I just experienced. My PC fan spooled up to max speed when I clicked on the link and everything went all 2001 Entering The Monolith on me. I panicked, but I stuck with it.
mlok 5y ago
Wow !! This is amazing. My last comment on HN was 5 days ago when I threw a bottle to the sea for a website I saw years ago : a story told in a calendar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29009014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29009014 And there it is !!! I find it again here thanks to you and your comment. (I was not much interested in this story so I was about to leave and I just had a quick look at the first comment : yours) This is an incredible luck ! Thank you very much !

th0ma5 5y ago

Made in my hometown of Shelby, Ohio.

dang 5y ago

Some past threads. Others? Centennial Light - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427081 - July 2019 (20 comments) This Light Bulb has been burning for 110 Years straight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8749576 - Dec 2014 (1 comment) The Centennial Light, a bulb that's reportedly been burning for 113 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353200 - Sept 2014 (29 comments) The lightbulb that's been burning for almost 110 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2642483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2642483 - June 2011 (9 comments)