Obituary: Edison's incandescent lightbulb, 1879-2014...?

Neil Baldwin By Neil Baldwin The Star-Ledger
on February 18, 2008 at 11:09 AM, updated February 18, 2008 at 11:51 AM

In the winter of 1879, Menlo Park was an electric showplace.

Against the black, brushstroke profiles of bare trees, slightly-tilted pine timber lampposts spaced fifty feet apart and crowned by helmet-shaped glass bulbs marched aglow across the snow-dusted fields. Sightseeing throngs milled and mingled through the rank and file of lamps looking for The Wizard himself -- wait, there he was, Professor Edison, coatless in the frigid air, a silk handkerchief knotted hastily around his neck!

What a fabulous, wondrous thing The Great Man had wrought - the electric light bulb. So safe and serene, unlike its predecessor, arc lighting -- those ugly carbon rods separated by a layer of gypsum that glowed when lit by a flame and then, like a candle, burned down after a mere hour or two. Arc lighting was well and good for the out-of-doors, unadjustable, hissing, throwing off embers brilliant as a Fourth of July sparkler.

For the needs of domesticity, there was illuminating gas. But alas, gas was costly. It could explode. It silently poisoned the ground, and water wells and cisterns, leaking out from the mains through it which it invisibly travelled. Gas blackened walls and discolored paintings and devoured oxygen and made you dizzy and gave you headaches. It smelled of sulfur and ammonia.

Ah, but the incandescent bulb! The spiral platinum wire filament (later replaced by cheaper and more readily-available molded carbon lamp-black) coated with magnesium oxide, the perfect insulator, glowed within a sheltered vaccum. Each bulb gave off the light equal to sixteen candles, yet spared the offending heat.

It glowed...for an astonishing 13 1/2 hours, "like the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn...the greatest environmental revolution in human history since the domestication of fire," said the pundits of the day.

"The light of the future -- my light," Edison told his enthralled Menlo Park laboratory visitors, "until some other fellow gets up a better one."

It seems as if that day has come.

For now they tell us that the new, spiral fluorescent bulb uses twenty-five percent of the energy of Edison's, and will last ten times longer. They tell us we have six more years before incandescence will no longer be available to the everyday consumer.

But in the rush to efficiency, let us not forget the five milligrams of mercury embedded within each spiral fluourescent. Eventually, hundreds of millions of these discarded bulbs will make their way into trash landfills.

E.P.A., take note.