Comment by vajrabum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vajrabum | Hacker News Reader

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The Phoebus cartel lowered the average life of bulbs from 2500hrs to 1000hrs. In 1949 a US court found that GE violated the Sherman Antitrust Act in part due to it's actions as part of that cartel. And from the article on the topic on Wikipedia:

The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours. A 1929 table listed the amount of Swiss francs paid that depended on the exceeding hours of lifetime.[11] Anton Philips, head of Philips, said to another cartel executive, "After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by paying no attention to voltages and supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life."[6]

So, yeah that looks exactly like the evil actions of a cartel unless maybe you're claiming this isn't factual. If so, I'd be very interested in your source of information.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

One data point from the above-linked Technology Connections video: decades after the end of the Phoebus cartel, the lifespan of most lightbulbs remained at 1,000 hours. You could get longer-life bulbs, but they consumed more power for a given amount of light, which made for a more expensive total cost to the consumer.

A 1000 hour life span was a reasonable trade-off between longevity and power efficiency.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

If the goal of the fine was to make sure power efficiency was good, they should have made a fine for having bad power efficiency, not a fine for lasting too long.

At the time there was one way to make the usual commercial lightbulb and the only one the group was regulating. I don't think it would make any difference even if the threshold was lazy / technically wrong.

I would think there would be a lot of variables that could be tweaked, such as shape, composition of the filament, gas, glass, filament support parts, thickness of the filament, shape of the filament, temperature that the filament was treated at.

The fine was in industry speak because it was only for industry. This is a chronic problem where commoners read stuff they don't actually understand, but think they do, and then completely freak out about it.

It sounds more like the chronic problem where rules are written without thinking very much about unintended consequences.

"Industry speak" sounds like it's just a debate about terminology. But I'm not simply suggesting changing the terminology, I'm suggesting actually measuring something else.

How about explaining that statement?

The bulbs emit more lumens per watt when the filament runs hotter, but it lowers its expected life span. Using a bulb with a longer life span wouldn't necessarily save you money, as you would need to use more electricity to get the same amount of light.

To What does this wasted electricity turns to, if not heat?

Efficiency is lower in a colder filament because more of the radiation is in the infrared for a given wattage. So you get more heat for an equal amount of visible light. Here is an example with plausible (but not real) numbers.

Higher current (hot filament): 1000 lumen, 100 W, 10 lumen/watt, 1000 hour lifetime

Lower current (colder filament): 333 lumen, 50 W, 6.66 lumen/watt, 3000 hour lifetime.

To emit 1000 lumen for 3000 hours you'll use 3 of the former lightbulbs (one after another) and consume 300 kWh, 100 per lightbulb.

And you'll also use 3 of the latter lightbulbs (in parallel) but you'll spend 450 kWh, 150 per lightbulb.

Heat. Just heat.

Remember, an incandescent light bulb is primarily a heater -- even in the very best case, most of the energy input becomes heat.

This heater just happens to be so hot that it glows white and produces usable light.

All of the electricity turns to heat in any case. The problem is the nature of incandescence. Incandescent filaments are black-body radiators. The spectrum of black body radiation changes with temperature[1], so filaments that run hotter emit a larger proportion of their energy in the visible spectrum.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Black_bo...

How did the cartel enforce fines on their members?

I would guess both through soft power from the heads of its members and their network as well as with the threat of exclusion from the cartel and being made an enemy of it. Cartels exist to crush competition after all and anyone who isn’t in the cartel is competition.

>I would guess both through soft power from the heads of its members and their network as well as with the threat of exclusion from the cartel and being made an enemy of it.

What does that translate into in practical terms for a lightbulb manufacturer?

Pick any anti-competitive tactic. For lightbulbs I’d say dumping cheap product priced well below cost in their sales territory would be an obvious option.

The thing is the the lifespan of bulbs is a tradeoff between brightness and lifespan. You make a 2000 hr bulb and it's half as a dim as a 1000 hr bulb, and so you're going to need 2 bulbs instead. Even today, long after the cartel is gone, there is no magic technology to make longer-lasting incandescent bulbs than they conspired to enforce back then.

The cartel was more of a marketing self-regulation conspiracy so that one manufacturer can't make claims that their bulbs are more cost-efficient when they're just plain dimmer.

>You make a 2000 hr bulb and it's half as a dim as a 1000 hr bulb

First, I assume you mean half as bright. Half as dim seems like the opposite of what you mean, or a very strange way to phrase it.

Second, you're saying that bulb lifetime scales linearly with brightness?

> Second, you're saying that bulb lifetime scales linearly with brightness?

Looks pretty close to it

https://www.raptorsupplies.com/pd/ge-lighting/25a-130v

https://www.raptorsupplies.com/pd/ge-lighting/50a19-rs-75v

> You make a 2000 hr bulb and it's half as a dim as a 1000 hr bulb, and so you're going to need 2 bulbs instead.

Dubious. Most people would not rewire a room in their house to install a new ceiling light because a new bulb was half as bright as the old, because the new bulb would probably still be adequately bright and the new light level is something they could adjust to (much easier than rewiring their ceiling.)

In other words, there isn't a linear relationship between bulb brightness and the number of bulbs people use. The number of bulbs people use is relatively unresponsive to bulb brightness because bulbs need fixtures and changing fixtures is a pain in the ass.

There might be no connection to how many bulbs people use, but how powerful they are. If you make bulbs less efficient, people will uses higher-power bulbs. Like 100 instead of 60W. And if the dimmer bulb is good enough, why not use a 40W bulb in the first place?

The problem is that nobody checked lumen/watt, or had the knowledge to make an educated choice based on it.

Imagine you sold a 2000 hr bulb that has two filaments in it, in parallel. It would fit the same fixture and make the same light as the equivalent 1000 hr bulb, but it would consume more because it runs at lower current and temperature.

You would make more money: almost all of the cost is the same as for the 1-filament version, but you could sell it for a higher price because it lasts twice as long. The buyer would pay for it slowly in the electricity bill, and ultimately be screwed.

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