Edison's oldest never-ending incandescent light bulb is 116 years old!
Amazingly, it was turned on back in 1901, when the first aircraft in history had not yet taken off, and since then it has never stopped working. This unique American landmark has been located in the fire department of the California city of Livermore for over a century.
She, as you might guess, is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. It happened in 1972, shortly after local reporter Mike Dunstan heard from station staff about the unusual longevity of the old lamp.
The "centennial lamp", as it is commonly called in the United States, even has its own official website (centennialbulb.org), on the main page of which you can contemplate an online broadcast of an amazing light source. A webcam installed specially for this purpose transmits a photo of a light bulb to the Internet every few minutes. Every day hundreds of curious people visit this resource hoping to see that the "centenary lamp" has finally gone out (why do they need it?), But this has not happened so far.
The webcam was installed here in 2010, and since then it has managed to break twice, but the amazing lamp is timeless.
The miracle device was made by hand in the 1890s by the American Shelby Electric Company. The glass for the 60-watt light bulb was blown in the traditional way. Its carbon filament, which is 8 times thicker than the spirals of modern lamps of this type, was created using the technology of Thomas Edison, but under the auspices of Adolph Scheie, a direct competitor of Edison.
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The secret of the longevity of the "centenary lamp"
The unusually high resource of the old woman is explained by the fact that in those days manufacturers worked conscientiously and created durable lamps, that is, they strove for this, not yet focusing on the sophisticated deceptive needs of the market.
It's not a secret for anyone that today industrialists practice the so-called planned obsolescence of goods, that is, they produce any products, including light bulbs, with a deliberately short service life, so that they quickly fail, and buyers ran to stores for replacement. By the way, it was incandescent light bulbs that became the first product that they began to specifically make insufficiently high-quality for long-term operation. To this end, at one time, manufacturers of incandescent lamps even gathered at an international council, where they agreed to reduce the service life of Edison's lamp to a certain (relatively small compared to the previous period) number of hours. And only the USSR at that time did not participate in this deal of the century, which is why Ilyich's light bulb was practically non-combustible for a long time (the older generation born in the USSR still remembers this well).
The secret of the longevity of the "hundred-year-old lamp" also lies in the fact that it is never extinguished, that is, there are simply no off-on cycles. Namely, they, as you know, most often lead to burnout of incandescent bulbs.
And, finally, the lamp in Livermore, although it worked initially with a given power of 60 watts, today this figure is only 4 watts, which, you see, is extremely small for effective lighting, but economical in terms of the longevity of the lighting fixture.
In 2001, firefighters celebrated the centenary of America's Little Pride. At the same time, a kind of "committee of a hundred-year-old light bulb" was created, dealing with the issue of preserving its working capacity for as long as possible - at any cost. It would be better, of course, if the manufacturers of modern light bulbs also took care of the durability of their products …
