http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/08/01/the_incandescent_bulb_an_obituary/
Lights out The incandescent bulb, an obituary By Jane Brox | August 1, 2010 The hot filament of the incandescent bulb has illuminated our loved ones, our books, our rooms for so long that its glow has come to feel as natural as daylight - maybe more so, since most of us spend the majority of our waking hours indoors and accompanied by its light. But now the days of Edison's bulb are numbered. The Energy Independence and Security Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, set strict efficiency standards for lighting that most incandescent bulbs will never be able to meet. The standards will be phased in over several years, beginning in 2012. Our familiar 100-watt bulbs will disappear from store shelves first, then 75-watt, then 60....By 2014, almost all the incandescent light we have traditionally used in our homes will be unavailable. Similar restrictions have already begun to take effect in Europe, Australia, Brazil, and Venezuela. China has begun its phase-out of incandescence, and Canada will begin its in 2012. It's difficult to imagine what life will be like without incandescence. There are, at the moment, few options to replace "old-fashioned bulbs," which means our near future threatens to be illuminated largely by the cold, off-color glow of compact fluorescents. For a panicky few this seems incomprehensible: They have begun hoarding packages of filament bulbs in their linen closets and basements. The romanticizing and fetishizing of the filament bulb has also come into its own. Upscale lighting catalogs offer replications of early models for sale, bulbs that most of us have never seen. Their ornately crazed carbon filaments - shaped like cages or dipping and turning - are reminiscent of those a visitor to Edison's Menlo Park lab might have encountered. Before Edison settled on a horseshoe-shaped filament for his first light, experimenters in his invention factory tried an array of forms - boxes, spirals, circles, fanciful sprouts and curlicues - "drawing out curiously shaped wires so delicate that it would seem an unwary touch would demolish them," in their efforts to produce an efficient, sustainable filament. The ones available to us now are as dim as all lights of the past: the "1890 Bulb" and the "Caged Bulb," 40 watts; the "Victorian Bulb," 30 watts. Edison's light: missed before it has departed. Such hoarding and romanticizing are testimony to incandescent light's extraordinary history. When introduced into urban society in the last decades of the 19th century, it was nothing like the fussy, stinking light it replaced, for it was a light born of invention: silent, contained within glass, possessing no apparent flame that had to be coaxed to life or tended. A child could be left alone with it! Almost no one understood how incandescence worked, but they did appreciate it. In 1882, when The New York Times offices were wired for electric lights, one reporter observed: "It was a light that a man could sit down under and write for hours without the consciousness of having any artificial light about him....The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight to have a light without a particle of flicker and with scarcely any heat to make the head ache. The electric lamps in the Times Building were as thoroughly tested...as any light could be tested in a single evening and tested by men who have battered their eyes sufficiently by years of night work to know the good and bad points of a lamp, and the decision was unanimously in favor of the Edison electric lamp as against gas." Although electric light in homes began as an urban luxury, by the early decades of the 20th century it had become the common light in middle-class urban and suburban homes. And it had come to mean more than light alone, for the same lines that brought light into homes brought with them an entirely new world full of gleaming things such as electric stoves, refrigerators, irons, and washing machines. So Edison's bulb, tied also to modern appliances, wasn't only markedly different in brilliance and kind, it was different in meaning from the light it replaced: the light of a modern century, pointing to the future, suggesting ease and sleekness. Yet it was not then the cheap, bountiful, democratic light we imagine it to be. Just as certain as the flick of a switch, there was a clearly defined edge between those who had it and those who did not. Among those who did not in the 1930s were rural Americans, most of whom still relied on kerosene lamps to see by. Kerosene, which had been its own vast improvement over oil and other mineral fuels when it arrived on the market in the late 1850s, had by then become an irrefutable symbol of backwardness. When electric lines finally came through rural communities, thanks to the rural electrification initiatives of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the reaction of farm families to their new illumination suggests the true power of electric light. Although they had also been living without electric washers, stoves, irons, and refrigerators, it was the light they were waiting for. One Pennsylvania lineman recalled: "I've seen this happen - the lights come on - hundreds of places, and it's an emotional situation you can't describe...something happens, lightning strikes them and they all at once are different. People prayed, they cried, they swore." In an instant they were so thoroughly done with the stink and fuss of the old that many communities held mock funerals for their kerosene lamps. Perhaps the kerosene burials were also unwitting funerals for a way of life. Incandescent light accompanied American society in its evolution out of its agrarian past. It dominated city life when the 1920 Census recorded more Americans living in cities and suburbs than farms for the first time. City life, which was always less tied than rural life to the turning of the seasons and the turning of the day, had been enjoying gradually lengthening nights for centuries. Under gaslight, as the quantity and quality of interior and exterior light increased, so did night life. With the arrival of electricity, that increase grew exponentially: Artificial light itself seemed to define a city. Why else, on the day after the 1965 blackout, would an Italian newspaper announce: "New York Cancelled by Darkness." By the time of the blackout, the fluorescent tube may not have been a common light in American homes, but it hummed and buzzed in public spaces, stores, and businesses. Developed in the General Electric laboratories and first displayed at the 1939 World's Fair, fluorescent tubes possessed none of the legendary history of Edison's bulb - the decades-long race for incandescence, the teeming laboratory. And fluorescence would for decades be associated with the utilitarian world as it flickered and buzzed above workers in cubicles, or patients sliding into CAT scan machines, or consumers buying paint and door hinges. If fluorescent tubes appeared in homes, they were largely confined to bathrooms, basement workshops, and kitchens - it was the light a housewife could chop an onion by. But not the light to illuminate a dinner of salmon and spring greens. That would be candlelight, actually, which has its own story stretching back to ancient times, though our refined tapers have nothing in common with the smoking, stinking tallow candles of the past, which were infinite trouble to keep lit. In the 19th century, most folks gladly gave up their candles and oil lamps for kerosene or for gas. And in turn, most people, when they could, gave up kerosene or gas for electricity, in part because the new was a vast improvement over the old. As we try to imagine a future without incandescence, a future lit - at least in the near term - mostly by compact fluorescents alone, perhaps for the first time the quality of our new light won't be an improvement over the old. Let the hoarding begin. Jane Brox's fourth book, "Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light," has just been published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She will be reading from it on Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Tory Hill Readers Series in Warner, N.H. She lives in Brunswick, Maine. © Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
