Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

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For an interesting real-world case of ignoring IP laws, one might look at the history of Philips and its light bulbs:

- The Netherlands didn't have patent laws in the decades that Edison was introducing his lamps

- Philips bought up the machines of competitors that Edison drove out of business through his patent monopoly and started producing lamps en masse in the Netherlands

- more than a few researches of said former competitors joined Philips' R&D crew, presumably partially out of spite, partially because it was the only place where they could continue their research

- this combination of experts and not giving a damn about patents resulted in really quick innovation at Philips' factories, meaning their light bulbs soon were both better and cheaper than anyone else's (of course, this only lasted until the light bulb manufacturers formed a cartel to introduce manufactured obsolescence).

- eventually the Netherlands caved in to international pressure to introduce patent laws. By then Philips was so huge that they started abusing it for patent trolling of their own.

About this "manufactured obsolescence of light bulbs" conspiracy theory which gets repeated over and over again: it's not that simple. Light bulbs have a spectacularly bad efficiency already, but the early light bulbs with their extremely long life were even worse. To quote Wikipedia, for a given light bulb, "A 5% reduction in voltage will double the life of the bulb, but reduce its light output by about 16%". So it's a tradeoff: if you make the filament thick enough, you'll have a light bulb which lasts for decades, but shines very dimly while consuming a lot of electricity. To improve efficiency, you can make the filament thinner, but then it'll burn out faster.

Funny how that is always used as a counter-argument when nobody gave a shit about light-bulb efficiency until three decades ago. Like, I'm sure it's technically true. I highly doubt this was in any way a motivation back in the day, especially since light bulbs, as inefficient as they are, were still much better than the candles and gaslight that preceded them.

There is a difference between a conspiracy theory and a well-documented conspiracy. The things the Phoebus Cartel did falls squarely into the latter, including the planned obsolescence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

You'd care if you were plugging up 1kW lightbulbs instead of 100W bulbs.

Those are called space heaters :)

In fact a company in Germany tried to circumvent the EU ban on lightbulbs by calling then heatballs. Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.

There also are (or were) a lot of consumer products which used ordinary incandescents for heat. The familiar example to Americans of a certain age is the EZ-Bake Oven, but there was a long tail of others, because if you wanted an off-the-shelf source for ~40-150W of heat, and the light is either a plus or neutral, it was tough to beat an Edison bulb and socket.

Another example of this:

Bird sanctuaries are harmed by the ban in some ways (though in the meantime they've no doubt found alternatives) because incandescent bulbs make great heaters.[1]

[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/incandescent-bulb-ban-...

> Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.

Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.

> Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient.

My personal concept of resistive heat is effective comes from a YouTube channel called Technology Connections. The argument is that almost all of the energy taken in by an electric resistive heater is given out as heat so it is pretty close to 100% efficiency. I understand that a heat pump is practically a better alternative for almost all use cases though.

Similarly, speaking of electric light bulbs, my understanding is there is no reason why an LED light bulb shouldn't last over ten years of continuous use. At least that is my impression from this reddit comment (please correct me if I am wrong)

https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/leunb1/why...

> There are many poorly manufactured LED lights out there. The LED itself is typically fine, but the driver electronics in the base tend to fail on poor quality products.

> I was having lots of failures for a while, but much less lately as I've tried to look for more brand name products.

And yet I've had two (name brand) LED bulbs die in the past year with <3 years of operational life. The drivers in most of these bulbs are garbage.

It's a shame that they can advertise the life of the diode itself with no regard for the rest of the electronics.

The second problem with LEDs is heat. LEDs produce a lot less heat than incandescents, but they also deal much worse with getting hot. Thus you need large (for surface area) and/or expensive (due to more expensive materials with high conductivity) heat sinks. Cheaper bulbs will tend to cheap out on this aspect, but there are also fundamental constraints especially in bulbs designed to fit traditional fittings.

I think heatpumps are something like 400% efficient for domestic heating, depending on outfoor temperature and so forth, so I guess resistive heating is inefficient by comparison, though I agree it seems weird to call close to 100% efficient "terribly inefficient". Probably losing heat from your lightbulbs to whatever is on the other side of your cieling is a significant factor too.

> I agree it seems weird to call close to 100% efficient "terribly inefficient"

A lot of my winter and nighttime electricity comes from natural gas.

50-60% of the heat energy in natural gas can get turned into electricity and make it to my house.

Then, it can be used to heat my ceiling a light bulb, where almost half of the heat immediately escapes my home. This is not a very good way to heat my house, versus my high-efficiency natural gas central air system that is more than 95% efficient in using the energy in natural gas to heat my home: it's about 3x worse.

Of course, even more efficient would be to use the natural gas to make electric power that runs a heat pump. That could be 200% efficient end-to-end.

>Of course, even more efficient would be to use the natural gas to make electric power that runs a heat pump. That could be 200% efficient end-to-end.

Or, as the gas is already being pumped to your home, use the natural gas directly to power the expansion engine of the heat pump. Noisy, though.

Or use the gas for cooling in the same manner that a propane-powered refrigerator does. Although I have no idea how efficient that would be.

> Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient.

Resistive heat has efficiency ~1. That is better that almost any other heating source with exception of heat pumps and cogeneration. If we consider visible light as a separate gain, then light bulb has efficiency ~1.02

> Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.

For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection. So it heats whole room and occupants, but not air.

I have no idea what the percentages are but based on a lifetime of anecdotal experience esp with incandescent, I'd bet you're wrong. Being across the room from a light bulb will warm you a bit, but nothing like proximity to the bulb, especially when you're above it.

A bare lightbulb is almost an anisotropic point source. You can put a reflector around it to target the IR in some direction. Its energy efficiency at the bulb is the same, i.e. nearly perfect. The energy delivered to target is different.

You're also being hit with more IR when you're closer. That being said, getting the same amount of light from an LED seems to only take 10% as much power, but they're also probably putting out much less IR, but LEDs still heat up a little, ...

> Resistive heat has efficiency ~1

It does if you only consider the efficiency of the electricity -> heat conversion, but electricity generation itself is often not that efficient. It can be a lot more efficient to go fuel -> heat than fuel -> electricity -> heat.

> That is better that almost any other heating source

... if you don't charge generation and transmission inefficiencies against it. High efficiency natural gas heating systems are 98% efficient; compare to natural gas combined cycle plants that are ~60% efficient, plus a few percent more lost to transmission and distribution.

> with exception of heat pumps

Sure, that's the actually-efficient source of heat from electricity.

> For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection.

For incandescent bulbs, this is unrealistic. The bulb is quite hot and heats the air around it and the fixture.

Moreover, of the IR, a whole lot also strikes the fixture and is conducted into the ceiling.

... if you don't charge generation and transmission inefficiencies against it.

Well yes. Statement 'efficiency of X' generally means 'useful work of X / relevant energy input into X on X boundary', not including efficiency of whole supply chain from primary energy source.

It's still a thing in Poland. They are either sold as heatballs or workshop light (doesn't have strobe effect which could be potentially dangerous around saws). That was mostly when fluorescent lightbulbs were the only alternative. These days people go for LED lightbulbs instead.

One trick of cold rooms and frozen pipes - put a light bulb in there.

In the (old) house that I'm in, there's a room that is for all practical purposes, under the garage. It is very poorly insulated and for some reason, some water pipes ran through it. On a cold winter, the pipes can freeze.

So, there's a lightbulb in there that for several years kept the pipes from freezing. The pipes have since been rerouted.

The next step up from just a lightbulb is to put a Y connector with two lightbulbs on it and screw a dusk to dawn sensor into one of the branches and then another lightbulb into that. This way, if the primary lightbulb burns out, the other one will turn on.

Nowadays space heaters are for bitcoin/ethereum production.

I keep wondering when ASIC+5G "electric heaters" will be nearly given away to people.

It’s not just efficiency. Super long lasting incandescent are also very dim and very red.

Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature.

> Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature

Then why did they need a secret agreement and fines to enforce it?

Because it was a technical trade-off/s

Errr... let me quote from the Wikipedia article you linked:

> Some engineers deemed 1,000 hours a reasonable figure to balance the various operational aspects of an incandescent bulb, since longer lifespan means reduced efficacy (lumens per watt): a longer-life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and therefore proportionally more heat) than a shorter-life bulb of the same wattage. Nevertheless, long-life incandescent bulbs were and are available with lifespan ratings up to 2,500 hours, and these do in fact produce less light per watt.

What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that while there was a cartel which did reduce the lifetime of commonly-used light bulbs, they didn't do it solely to increase their profits - there was an actual technical tradeoff involved, and they chose a figure which provided (in their opinion) a good balance of all the involved parameters. That's what always gets forgotten when this story is mentioned.

The collusion between massive companies to keep out smaller competitors is the thrust of the matter, not what levers they pulled.

> they didn't do it solely to increase their profits

But they also did pretty obviously do it in part to increase their profits.

The cartel was formed in part as a response to the volatility of the lightbulb market (there was so much competition it was difficult for any company to stay dominant or to maintain stable/predictable profits), and was followed by a large increase of sales for the cartel's members.

Short of long-term environmental costs (which nobody was seriously worrying about in the early 1900s), there's very little reason to standardize the light output, efficiency, and lifespan of a bulb, which could instead be determined by consumer choice in a free market.

If the Pheobes Cartel was simply setting labeling standards, maybe it would be debatable whether or not there was any bad intention. But it remains a good example of planned obsolescence in part because of the excuses engineers used at the time, which were pretty clearly not the entire reason for cartel's formation, but were used to dismiss criticism of reduced competition.

It's a good lesson for people to learn: planned obsolescence is usually accompanied by a couple of engineering reasons for the tradeoffs, and sometimes those tradeoffs are justifiable in a vacuum. But planned obsolescence removes the ability for the consumer to choose their own tradeoffs and to optimize for their own needs, and instead it prioritizes making specific technical tradeoffs that just coincidentally happen to benefit the company's bottom line.

Here's another quote from the article:

> The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.

The simple fact that they explicitly set a lower operational life target rather than setting a minimum target tells me everything I need to know about what they were trying to do. The additional fact that they fined manufacturers who exceeded the target doesn't leave much room for speculation.

If they had any interest whatsoever in efficiency as the driver, the targets would have been based on an efficiency target like lumens per watt rather than life expectancy.

Personally, I think the color and higher luminosity per light bulb (both very desired features at the times of incandescent lighting) were what made those bulbs successful.

Even though those companies made an effort to push the bulbs (and were very happy with the result), and they were overall cheaper for the customer than the long-lived ones, I don't think any of those factors is impactful enough to explain the change on the entire market. Notice that those companies didn't own the entire market at the time, just a huge fraction of it. If people wanted the yellower bulbs, they could get them.

> I highly doubt this was in any way a motivation back in the day, especially since light bulbs, as inefficient as they are, were still much better than the candles and gaslight that preceded them.

There are still examples of these early light bulbs in museums and such. They are very, very dim, producing light akin to that of a hair dryer. A modern person would be pretty shocked at just how little light these things put out. It's the reason gas street lamps stuck around into the 40s and 50s; nearly outlasting the Phoebus Cartel.

None of which is evidence that a cartel was necessary to enforce different standards; consumer preference would have solved that problem on its own.

Power efficiency problems only require cooperation to solve in instances where the downsides aren't immediately visible to the consumer (ie, long-term decreased power costs, labeling, environmental costs). But people definitely weren't worried about environmental efficiency of light bulbs when the Phoebus Cartel started up. For consumer-visible deficiencies (as in literally how much visible light a lightbulb produces), you don't need collusion to convince consumers to make the switch to a clearly (pun intended) better product.

It's worth noting just how janky and circuitous these standards were as a way of increasing efficiency, given that Phoebus Cartel had perfectly good measures for efficiency that they could have targeted instead. There were not rules for minimum lumens, or max wattage, or minimum efficiency; there were only rules on maximum lifespan. In fact, for their "class B" category of lamps, not only did the Phoebus Cartel not impose minimum efficiency measures, they actually included an upper bound on how efficient Class B lamps were allowed to be.

I think it's extremely unlikely that the Phoebus Cartel was primarily worried about the environmental costs of inefficient light bulbs, and I think it's extremely unlikely that in the absence of a cartel consumers would have been unable to tell the difference between a dim lightbulb and a bright one when making purchasing decisions. The most likely explanation of their behavior is the simplest one; they set constraints designed to maximize profits and decrease the risk of large competitors out-innovating each other, and then designed engineering optimizations and standards to fit into those constraints, not the other way around.

People cared, that's why large office buildings were using flourescent lights in the 1960s. Homeowners didn't care, because incandescent lights had a more pleasing color spectrum and the cost of running them was insignficant in the overall household budget, even with their inefficiency.

> About this "manufactured obsolescence of light bulbs" conspiracy theory which gets repeated over and over again:

You should be really cautious when using the phrase “conspiracy theory” especially when talking about a cartel for which we have plenty of historical evidences.

Of course the Phoebus cartel isn't responsible for all problems with light bulbs, and it didn't even worked as well as it was supposed to and not for as long as it was supposed to, but it is still a real thing.

Here's what an everlasting lightbulb looks like. https://youtu.be/jx1d3j1IEoI?t=73 I wish they weren't illegal in california.

It's not just a theory. It's real. There was enforcement and everything, and decisions made to increase profit at cost of harm to the consumer. Veritasium did a video on it if you'd like to follow up there, and it's sourced.

"conspiracy theory which gets repeated over and over again"

Gravity is also theory - but there is so much evidence that a layman would call both a fact.

"To quote Wikipedia, for a given light bulb, "A 5% reduction in voltage will double the life of the bulb, but reduce its light output by about 16%"."

The intention is irrelevant - the point is that they conspired to manipulate the market, which is illegal.

If it's okay because someome deems the decision right, then robbing banks to feed poor people is okay too.

Every country ignores copyright in the beginning. America did it too but it is not polite to mention this now.

But there is a tipping point when international enforcement of copyright and patents starts to work in your favour.

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