Hey, welcome to your podcast "discovering nowhere".

Today we will talk about things like cars,

light bulbs, printers, phones, and an actual conspiracy that made them worse.

Before I begin, I have a curious fact for you, in the Livermore fire station number 6, in there, they
have the longest continuously on light bulb in the world. It has been on for one hundred-twenty
years, since ninteen-nule one. It´s not even connected to a light switch, but it does have a backup
battery generator.

So, the big question is: how has the light bulb lasted so long? It was manufactured by hand not
long after commercial light bulbs were first invented, and yet, it has been running for over a
million hours, way longer than any light bulb today is meant to last.

Awhile back, a friend of mine told me this story: that someone had invented a light bulb that
would last forever years ago, but they never sold it because an everlasting light bulb makes for a
terrible business model. I mean you would never have any repeat customers and eventually you
would run out of people to sell light bulbs to. I thought this story sounded ridiculous. If you could
make an everlasting light bulb, then everyone would buy your light bulb over the competitors, and
so you could charge really high prices, make a lot of money, even if demand would eventually dry
up. I just couldn´t imagine that we had better light bulbs in the past and the intentionally made
them worse, but it turns out I was wrong.

At least sort of. Inventing a viable electric light bulb was hard, I mean the typical incandescent
design, which just involves electric current through a material making it so hot that it glows, less
than 5% of electrical energy comes out as light. The other nine% is released as heat. So, these are
really heat bulbs, which give off a little bit of light as by-product. The temperature of the filament
can get up to twenty-eight hundred Kelvin. That is half as hot as the surface of the sun. At
temperatures like those, most materials melt. And if they don´t melt… they burn, which is why in
the eighteen-forties, Warren De la Rue came up the idea of putting the filament in a vacuum bulb,
so there´s no oxygen to react with. By eighteen-seventy-nine, Thomas Edison had made a bulb
with a cotton thread filament that lasted fourteen hours. Other inventors created bulbs with
platinum filaments or other carbonized materials. And gradually, the lifespan of bulb increased.
The filament changed from carbon to tungsten, which has a every high melting point. And by the
early nineteen-twenties, average bulb lifetimes were approaching 2-tousand hours with some
lasting twenty-five hundred hours. But this is when lifetimes stopped getting longer and started
getting shorter.

In Genova, Switzerland just before Christmas, nineteen-twenty-four, there was a secret meeting of
top executives from the world´s leading light bulb companies, Phillips, International General
Electric, Tokyo electric, Osram from Germany, and the UK´S Associated Electric among others.
They formed what became known as the Phoebus Cartel, named after Phoebus, the Greek God of
light. There, all these companies agreed to work together to help each other, by controlling the
world supply of light bulbs. In the early days of the electrical industry, there had been lots of
different small light bulb manufacturers, but by now they had largely been consolidated into these
big corporations, each dominated in a particular part of the world. The biggest threat they all
faced was form longer lasting light bulbs. For example in nineteen-twenty-three, OSRAM sold
sixty-three million light bulbs, but the following year they sold only twenty-eight million. Light
bulbs were lasting too long, eating into sales. So all the companies in the cartel agreed to reduce
the lifespan of their bulbs to one hundred hours cutting the existing average almost in half. But
how could each company ensure that the other companies would actually follow the rules and
makes shorter lasting light bulbs. After all, it would be in each of their individual interests to make
a better product to outsell the others?

Well to enforce the thousand hour limit, each of the manufacturers have to send in sample bulbs
from their factories and they were tested on big test stands. If a bulb lasted significantly longer
than a thousand hours, then the company was fined. If a light bulb lasted longer than 3 thousand
hours, well the fine was 2 hundred Swiss France for every thousand bulbs sold. And there are
records of these fines being issued to companies. But how do you make a worst light bulb in the
first place? Well, the same engineers who had previously been tasked with extending the lifespan
now had to find ways to decrease it. So they tried different materials, different shaped materials
and thinner connections. And if you look at the data, they were successful. Ever since the
formation of the cartel, the lifespan of light bulbs steadily decreased. So that by nineteen-thirty-
four, the average lifespan was just twelve hundred and five hours. And just as they had planned,
sales increased for cartel members by 25% in the four years after nineteen-twent-six. And even
though the cost of components came down, the cartel kept process virtually unchanged, so they
increased their profits margins. So did people know that the light bulb companies were conspiring
together to make their products worse? No, the Phoebus Cartel claimed that its purpose was to
increase standardization and efficiency of light bulbs. I mean, they had did stablished the screw
thread is standard, you can find it on virtually all light bulbs around the world now. But all
evidence points to the cartels being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was
best for costumers.

Then of second world war Cartel was dead, but its methods survived to this day. There a lots of
companies out there that intentionally shortened the lifespan of their products it´s a tactic known
now as planned obsolescence.

And this is how this method survives to the present day,

Planned obsolescence is something that many companies use, and this is the case of Apple, a
company that as their iPhones are released, the old ones begin to become slow and many
applications and updates are no longer available. Not only happens with Apple, it is a standard
that happens with all brands of telephones and electronic devices, as well as with household
appliances.

It is a clear example that the only thing that matters is not the well-being of the people but the
well-being of the companies.

And that well-being is summarized in that they can continue to earn money, giving a good product,
but not the best product.