[Youden]

It wasn't as simple as them wanting to make more money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

Key points from an AI summary:

- Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan.

- Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply "better" products being suppressed.

- The 1,000 hour target was a reasonable compromise that balanced these competing priorities, not necessarily a sinister plot.

- Even after the Phoebus cartel dissolved, the 1,000 hour lifespan remained the industry standard for general-purpose incandescent bulbs.

[jimmydorry]

You're missing the fact that the Phoebus cartel fined members that sold lightbulbs lasting longer than 1,000 hours. Aftr reaching a stable equilibrium, it's not surprising that 1,000 hours remained the industry standard. It drove sales!

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-04/cheeri...

[hmottestad]

The reason for this, as I understand it, is that it's super easy to make a lightbulb that lasts 30 years. But there are two main trade-offs that make it bad for consumers:

1. Stronger filaments that last longer will be a lot less efficient, so the consumer ends up using a lot more electricity.

2. The filament doesn't burn per-say, but actually evaporates. This is why it'll eventually break. But where does the evaporated metal go? It condenses on the inner surface of the glass, making the lightbulb dimmer than when it was new.

So 1000 hours is a good middle ground. The lightbulb is fairly efficient and 1000 hours isn't long enough for the inside of the glass to get too dark from the condensed filament metal.

Price of the bulbs was also reasonably low. It's cheaper to change out a lightbulb every 1000 hours than the electricity costs of a 10 000 hour lightbulb that emits the same amount of visible light. I don't have hard numbers for that, but it's my understanding.

Watch the youtube video linked by one of the grandparent comments. It's super informative and also contains some experiments to show the trade-offs.

[macNchz]

I really don't see this as a debunking of the idea that the cartel was set up primarily to increase profits among its members. The engineering tradeoffs make sense, but it doesn't follow that because of these tradeoffs, the companies manufacturing lightbulbs were compelled to set up an organization that fined its members for making bulbs that lasted too long. The tradeoffs explanation seems like a post-hoc justification for something that was clearly done with anti-competitive intent.

Ultimately which scenario makes the most sense: that these businesses went through the time and effort to set up this testing organization out of a desire to ensure they all made better products for consumers, or out of a realization that they could all stabilize their revenues if they all sold products that would need to be replaced on a regular basis?

This also strikes me as an area where consumer choice can be particularly effective: most of the attributes of a lightbulb aside from energy consumption are pretty tangible to the end user, and since they are fairly inexpensive and replaceable, the buyer is more able to evaluate them side by side than many other things. It makes total sense to me that the manufacturers would see this as a problem, and choose to limit consumer choice instead of competing to make better products.

[glenstein]

This is a both can be true situation. Its legacy was a cartel oriented around protecting profits, but the coordination nevertheless also reflected an array of engineering compromises that made sense. The situation we have now is that those compromises continued to have a rationale beyond the existence of the cartel.

[tpmoney]

If I remember right from the last time I looked into this, they also fined members for making bulbs that lasted shorter than 1000 hours. The goal was a standardized product, largely to protect regional sales agreements rather than any specific concerns about long bulb life vs sales.

[AnthonyMouse]

This sounds like classic corporate bamboozlery. Find some real trade off that actually exists and then exaggerate its importance or pretend that no other solutions can be found when in fact they don't want solutions because the problem is profitable.

Undoubtedly there are some alternate materials you could make a light bulb out of that present a trade off between longevity and efficiency. But there will also be materials that last a long time and have high efficiency. Moreover, even if they want to use the filament material that emits whiter light and then burns up faster, they could then use more of it so it still doesn't burn out quickly. But they don't want to do that, because it would cost marginally more and more importantly then you wouldn't have to buy as many light bulbs.

It's no good to pretend this isn't possible. There isn't an inherent trade off between brightness and efficiency, because inefficiency is just the percentage of the electricity that goes to producing heat rather than light. At the same power consumption, a more efficient bulb is brighter. LEDs are rated as "100W equivalent" even though they consume ~20W. And the LEDs themselves last far longer than the equivalent incandescent light, but then they purposely combine them with a power converter that burns out much sooner. It's marketing, not physics.

[marcosdumay]

> Undoubtedly there are some alternate materials you could make a light bulb out of that present a trade off between longevity and efficiency.

You seem to be out of your depth here, while accusing people of propaganda.

Anyway, no there aren't. The efficiency x longevity trade-off is inherent to the incandescent bulbs, you can't just wave all of Quantum Mechanics away. Material changes will increase or decrease the entire pair, and bulbs were already made with the best material that could possibly be used.

And leds, of course are different.

Anyway, nobody on the entire thread is denying that the cartel wanted to increase profits. What people are trying to say is that reality is more complex than looking at a single organization goals and deciding what happens.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The efficiency x longevity trade-off is inherent to the incandescent bulbs, you can't just wave all of Quantum Mechanics away. Material changes will increase or decrease the entire pair, and bulbs were already made with the best material that could possibly be used.

What you're ignoring is that although a different material would still have the trade off, the optimal point on the curve for that material could be in a different place. Material A lasts for 1000 hours at a given amount of light/watt, Material B only lasts for 500 hours at that amount of light/watt, but lasts for 3000 hours at only 15% less light/watt, which some people might want. As an example, there are some applications where the bulb is repeatedly being turned on for only short periods of time, which would tend to shorten lifespan from thermal stress but also implies that power efficiency is less important because the bulb isn't continuously on.

The optimal trade off would also be different for different people. If your light bulb is hard to reach, saving two bucks worth of electricity over its lifetime may not be worth having to drag out a ladder or disassemble a piece of equipment to change it more often. If you have electric heat in a cold climate, a bulb that generates a higher ratio of heat to light isn't costing you anything because you were only going to use a different kind of electric heater regardless. But the cartel took those peoples' options away, claiming that the trade off could only be made one way.

And even for a given material, the failure mode is that enough of the material evaporates for it to lose structural strength and snap. Implying that you could use more of the same material with the same efficiency but improve structural strength.

> And leds, of course are different.

They don't operate in a universe with different physical laws, proving that incumbent incandescent bulbs are nowhere near the limits physics imposes on efficiency.

You don't have to ban longer lifetimes unless you're afraid someone will find a way to do better.

[elzbardico]

I call this the "Prager-U law":

For every issue created by cartels or monopolies, there will be at least one "Akschually..." competitive explanation from libertarians that will either give a completely benign explanation of why this is actually good for your or blame the government/regulations for the issue.

Those explanations will become memes and every single time the subject is discussed they will be brandished by the faithful as axiomatic truths in ad nauseam fashion.

[AnthonyMouse]

The better way to understand libertarianism is to characterize regulation as something like "a rule anybody makes up and then punishes people for violating it even if they never agreed to follow it." Now you don't need to resort to weird contortions to handle cartels and things because they're just a form of government and therefore something to be limited in order to restore the benefits of free market competition.

[tomcam]

PragerU isn’t libertarian. This indicates you don’t understand their biases. The “Akschually” snark indicates both that you don’t observe HN guidelines and that you are not arguing in good faith.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

    Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

[elzbardico]

You assume too much stuff, man.

This is just an internet forum for us technology well paid proletarians, you shouldn't take it that seriously.

[tomcam]

Non-answer

[macNchz]

Well, without the cartel there could have presumably been bright white, 1000 hour bulbs on the shelf next to dim yellow 2500 hour bulbs, and people could have chosen accordingly.

Additionally, the companies set up a whole compliance regime with bulb testing and fines, not for bulbs being too dim, but for bulbs that lasted too long, which I think clarifies the intent more than anything else.

[ndiddy]

There were long-lasting bulbs on the shelf, but they were niche products because they produced poor quality light and were inefficient. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQpqyt3oeqk . Note that it consumes 40 watts but produces the same light output as a standard 25 watt bulb.

[HPsquared]

It's a question of temperature.

Hotter filament gives more efficient and whiter light (the black body radiation has more visible and less infrared), but the hotter filament doesn't last as long (faster evaporation rate).

It's perfectly possible for end users to use a dimmer switch to make incandescent lamps last much, much longer at the expense of less light and a "warmer" colour.

Lifespan is very, very sensitive to the temperature.

[aitchnyu]

Which cartel is making consumer bulbs and streetlights with advertised 50000 hour led but with 5000 hour drivers? Indian market BTW.