Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In the vast online world, there is an old-fashioned niche website called centennial bulb, which is all about a light bulb that has been lit almost continuously since it was put into use in 1901. With 120 years (more than 989000 hours) of use, this bulb has become the world's longest-lived light bulb and has been recognized by Guinness World Records many times.

Open the website is such a picture, very simple and old, the website also has a watermark celebrating 120 years of lighting bulbs. In the middle of the site is a photo of the bulb, continuously captured by a camera and updated every 30 seconds/www.cenennialbulb.org This bulb was made by Shelby Electric Company around 1890, and the process is very primitive. The bulb is hand-blown, and the filament is an ancient carbon filament--I think everyone has heard the story of Edison inventing the bulb: "Edison experimented with more than 1600 materials and did thousands of experiments, and finally found carbonized cotton filament as the best filament material"-the filament of this light bulb is this carbon fiber, and Edison only began commercial production of light bulbs in 1878.

Edison's lightbulb design sketch/ wikipedia This antique, almost contemporary with Edison's lightbulb, was donated to the Livermore-Pleasant Fire Department in California in 1901 and continues to be used to the present day, being recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest-working lightbulb around 1970, 2007, 2012 and 2014. But because of the age of the lamp, the original power of 30 watts or 60 watts has become only 4 watts of brightness.

This bulb is not alone, of course, and there are plenty of bulbs around its time that continue to light up today. For example, the second-oldest bulb has been working for 112 years, and of course its brightness is also very low. People also set up Facebook accounts for it and regularly update its work status. The third and fourth bulbs lasted 91 and 93 years, respectively, and they didn't break until after 2000.

The second-oldest light bulb also has a Facebook page of its own. Every second these long-standby light bulbs light up silently reveals to us a big conspiracy in the industry-they adopt a "planned obsolescence" strategy for their products, so that they can make more money by making them wear out faster, so that users can buy them more frequently.

The earliest proposal of "planned obsolescence" is the lamp manufacturer. Light bulbs around 1920 easily reached more than 2500 hours of use, some of which, as mentioned earlier, lasted longer, and with increasing competition in the lighting industry, small manufacturers slashed prices wildly.

This caused the large lamp manufacturers to sell bulbs year by year, so they gathered in Geneva on December 23, 1924, held an international light bulb conference, in which it was decided to set up an organization called Helios Monopoly Alliance, aiming to increase the supply and demand relationship by controlling the life of bulbs, so that consumers planned to eliminate bulbs. Many of the alliance's members are still familiar to us today: Osram, Philips, General Electric, etc.

The Philips Company Archives Alliance stipulated that all bulbs must have a life span of about 1000 hours, and fines must be imposed if they are too high or too low. At the time, increasing the lifespan was actually easy to do, but precisely controlling the bulb's lifespan was a big challenge. In order to gradually reduce lamp life, all alliance manufacturers have established a liaison mechanism between them to exchange technology for reducing lamp life at any time. The work was indeed fruitful: between 1926 and 1934, the average life of a light bulb fell by a third, from 1800 hours to just 1205 hours.

In an effort to convince the public of the decline in bulb life, the coalition began advertising and advertising that the longer the bulb life, the less efficient it would be, and that older bulbs would generate more heat and waste electricity. GE even made a short film proclaiming that 1000 hours is the best life for a bulb. Although this alliance has died with the start of World War II, and the life of modern energy-saving bulbs and LED bulbs has far exceeded 1000 hours, reaching 10000 hours and 15000 hours respectively, but is there any artificial control of bulb life in modern bulbs?

The life of modern LED bulbs has been greatly extended compared to incandescent lamps, and more energy-saving environmental protection map/ Pxhere However, the idea of planned scrapping left by the Sun God Monopoly Alliance has inspired many other manufacturers and developed many similar tricks:

One of them is the idea of systematic project obsolescence, which is to deliberately change the system design to make it difficult for the product to continue to use. For example, in software, backward compatibility is deliberately removed, forcing customers to replace hardware for software service; for example, parts are not common between old and new versions of machines, so that when the old machine breaks down, it cannot be repaired from the new machine, so it must be replaced with a new machine.

There is also a pre-set scrap idea. For example, in the field of printers, some merchants will add counting chips to ink cartridges, or deliberately limit the ink capacity in ink cartridges, so that users can only replace new ink cartridges after using them for a limited number of times. It is not difficult to design ink cartridges that can add ink or powder, but how can manufacturers make money? An ink cartridge 150, can only be used for half a year, or an ink cartridge sold 300, plus toner can be used indefinitely, with the toes know which is more profitable.

The toner cartridge is also widely used in printers, and each time it is replaced, a whole root must be replaced. This is also a kind of planned scrapping. The last one is the limitation of software and hardware. For example, the design of mobile phones that cannot be disassembled, although the mobile phone can be used but the battery has a life span, the official replacement of a battery 1000; or the new system after the new mobile phone is released deliberately makes the old mobile phone stuck, forcing the user to replace the new one_yes, I am talking about Apple. The design of mobile phones with detachable batteries has now become a non-detachable design, thanks to Apple. The original Nokia bought three batteries for a week, but now it has to be charged once a day--the charging treasure industry must thank Apple, not Apple, where is the popularity of charging treasure!

iPhone 4, this is the most classic Apple mobile phone, undoubtedly the best looking mobile phone at that time, but its non-removable battery design began to take the whole mobile phone industry to follow suit, more than a decade later, there is basically no mobile phone with removable battery design/ Pixabay Of course, manufacturers always have various reasons for their planned obsolescence design, such as the original toner cartridge is more friendly to the printer. Designed in the form of toner can easily lead to machine card shell, non-removable battery design can be dustproof, the new mobile phone system hardware requirements, in order to prevent the old mobile phone CPU and battery damage so limit the performance of the old mobile phone ah, but really is this?

References:

https://shimo.im/docs/9WKPxjqXjxdGttrv

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Bringing Science Home (ID: steamforkids), by Shen Mengxi

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