It deservedly bears the title of the oldest light bulb in the world, because it has been burning for more than a century. To be precise, 117 years old. The service life of a conventional incandescent lamp does not exceed 2000 hours, while modern LED lamps have a margin of safety several times greater, reaching 50 thousand hours. But 1 million 25 hours is an absolute record and far from the limit. What's the secret?
A bit of history
The world's oldest light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison. This happened in 1879, when he was conducting experiments to improve carbon filaments.
Edison worked for almost a year - he managed to increase the resource to 1200 hours, after which mass production began lighting fixtures.
At the time, the Parisian Shaie was only 11 years old. His childhood and adolescence fell on a period when the popularity of lighting was growing rapidly. Chaie's father owned a small incandescent lamp company, and his son, with a keen interest in the products, decided to connect his life with physics.
Science interested him as a foundation for creating a light bulb that burns for 100 years, and the opportunity to make good money on the invention. Shaie studied in parallel at the German and French academies, and after graduation he worked in a large profile company in Germany.
Then he moved to America and opened his own production. Shaie's factory was called the Shelby Electric Company.
Experiment in public
The physicist and the inventor succeeded in their plans. In 1897, representatives of Shelby Electric announced that their products were 20% brighter than those of competitors, and they had almost a third more resource.
When testing an incandescent lamp from different manufacturers installed side by side and connected to the same electrical network. Then the voltage began to rise smoothly. One after another the lamps burned out and exploded. A few minutes after the start of the experiment, the laboratory was illuminated only by Shelby devices. Not a single lamp is out of order.
As soon as the article came out, the company received double the usual orders - employees had to work at night to complete them. The issue continued actively for the next decade, after which things began to decline.
The owner of the company did not want to modernize production, as a result of which Shelby could not compete with other firms. In 1914, she stopped the production of lamps.
Lamp from Livermore
The 100-year-old light bulb, as it is popularly called, is one of those produced by Shelby Electric. In 1901, it was bought and included for the first time. But she became famous much later.
In 1972, a California newspaper ran a curious story. According to the head of the fire inspection Livermore, they have an unusual light bulb in the room that has been continuously lit for several decades. Firefighters wrote legends about it, but no one knew when it was lit.
Young proactive reporter Mike Dunstan, having heard an unusual story, decided to investigate on his own. He found dozens of eyewitnesses, collected their written and oral memories and reconstructed the history of the longest light bulb in the world.
Dunstan discovered that the legendary model was bought by Dennis Bernal and the seller was Livermore's first energy company. It happened at the end of the 19th century - the journalist could not establish the exact year.
Then the lamp illuminated the garage, the mayor's office, and in 1901 it got into the city fire department. It burned around the clock at low power - only 4 watts, used as night lighting. Operating conditions - deep underflow and low efficiency.
The legendary lamp was turned off only 2-3 times. The last time was 22 minutes in 1976. Before that, it did not burn for almost a week, when in the 30s of the last century, reconstruction took place in the fire station.
A light bulb that has been burning for 100 years is a city landmark, everyone can watch it online. Recently, a webcam has been installed in the fire department and is aimed at a unique device. Representatives of the Guinness Book of Records, determined her age and determined that she is the oldest in the world.
An ordinary light bulb glorified the unremarkable town of Liverme. Tens of thousands of people watch it online, thousands come to see a unique ceiling lamp that burns and does not go out. Firefighters are happy to organize excursions to her.
In 2001, local residents celebrated the 100th anniversary of the light bulb. The celebration included barbecues, contests and live music. Musical accompaniment was provided by three ensembles at once.
What's next?
The firefighters are not going to change the popular light bulb that made their station and town famous. But even when it burns out, it will not go to the trash. Several museums want to immortalize the electrical long-liver in their exhibits. The first in line is the Ripley Museum.
What is the secret of such an impressive service life? Physicists have not figured it out.
Residents of the American city of Livermore are preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the oldest in the world light bulb... For 110 years now, it has been shining practically without interruption, writes The Telegraph. The four-arm light bulb, installed in the fire station in Livermore, California, entered the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest operating light bulb on the planet.
A businessman gave it to local firefighters in 1901. Since then, the light bulb has faithfully served the fighters with fire. The days when it suddenly ceased to shine seem to be remembered by all the inhabitants of Livermore by heart: one day in 1903, a week in 1937 and during rare power outages in the 30s - 70s of the XX century. According to Livermore power engineer Lynn Owens, the mysterious light bulb baffles many scientists. "Nobody knows why an ordinary four-watt light bulb did not burn out in 110 years. Scientists from all over the country came to look at it, but no one was able to put forward a single more or less plausible version. We did not let anyone touch it," - said the power engineer.
The centenary lamp is the name for the longest-burning lamp in the world. It is located in the fire department of Livermore, California and has been continuously burning from 1901 to the present. The fire department claims that this lamp has been continuously lit for at least 113 years and has turned off only a few times during this entire period. The unusually high resource of the lamp was provided mainly by operation at low power (4 watts), in deep sub-core, with very low efficiency. Due to its durability, the "Centennial Lamp" has been listed in the Guinness Book of Records and is often cited as evidence of the "planned obsolescence" of more recent incandescent lamps. The lamp is dedicated to its own offsite, where you can look at it online at any time of the day through specially installed cameras. The lamp was produced by a private company Shelby Electric Company, which disappeared in 1912 as a result of the takeover by General Electric.
The lamp was created in accordance with the work of Edison's competitor, Adolphe Chaie. Its filament was made from carbon (it is 8 times thicker than modern lamps). There is a version that this explains the incredible longevity of the lamp. At the beginning of the 20th century, manufacturers decided to abandon such a manufacturing technology and such incandescent lamps did not receive mass production.
The "centenary lamp" originally had a power of 30 or 60 watts, but at the moment it is very dim, giving off about the same amount of light as, for example, a 4-watt night lamp. The lamp was manufactured by hand at the Shelby, Ohio facility in the late 1890s. There is evidence that the lamp was used in at least four locations. It was originally installed in the fire department premises in 1901, and then moved to a garage in downtown Livermore, which was owned by the fire and police departments. When the fire departments were merged, the lamp was moved again, now to the newly built city hall, where the fire department was transferred.
Her unusual longevity was first noticed in 1972 by reporter Mike Dunstan while talking to Livermore veterans. In the Tri-Valley Herald newspaper, he published an article where it was literally written: "The light of the lamp may be the oldest." Dunstan went to Guinness World Records, Ripley's Believe It or Not, and General Electric Corp., who confirmed it was indeed the longest-lasting light bulb ever known. In 1976, the fire department moved to another building. The legendary lamp was removed by cutting off its wire, as there was concern that twisting it out could damage it. The lamp was unplugged for just 22 minutes when the handover ceremony took place, in a specially designed box and fully escorted by fire trucks. "Believe It or Not" Ripley made a statement that a small forced outage of the lamp could not affect the continuous burning record. In 2001, the 100th anniversary of the lamp was inaugurated. In addition to the shutdown during the move, there were other short interruptions in its operation (for example, during the week in 1937 for repairs, as well as during accidental power outages).
On the evening of May 20, 2013, already under the supervision of a special webcam, the light went out. The public was inclined to believe that it was burned out. The next morning, an electrician appeared to confirm this assumption. However, it was determined that the light bulb did not burn out when the power supplying it uninterruptible power supply was replaced by an extension cord. It turned out that the power supply was defective. After about seven hours, the light came on again. The Centenary Lamp is currently under the supervision of the Centenary Light Committee, Livermore Fire Department, Livermore Heritage Guild, Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory. The Livermore Fire Department intends to keep the Centenary Lamp burning no matter how long it will take before it burns out.
The average operating time of an incandescent lamp ranges from 1,000 to 2,000 hours. LED lamp boast a longer "life" - from 25,000 to 50,000 hours, which is why they gradually displace traditional incandescent lamps from the lighting market.
But all this is nothing compared to a lonely hanging light bulb in the basement of a California fire department, which has been providing continuous light for 989,000 hours, that is, almost 113 years. Experts from General electrics and physicists around the world have already proclaimed it a source of eternal light.
The question arises: how can this be? Either this is another miracle of nature, or a sign of how little we know about incandescent lamps and that modern copies are not suitable for them. Let's try to figure it out.
Short story light bulb
The laurels of the inventor of the light bulb belong to the notorious Thomas Edison (1879), but it should be said that he was not the only one who tried to create an electric light source.
In 1802, the British chemist Humphry Davy first obtains light by heating thin strips of platinum with an electric current. Over the next 75 years, Davy's experiment served as a kind of basis for the search for other inventors, who also tried to find a way to extract bright and durable light by heating thin strands of one or another metal.
Scottish inventor James Bowman Lindsay was able to obtain a bright light in 1835, which, he said, allowed him to "read a book at a distance of one and a half feet" - but he soon abandoned experiments in this area to focus entirely on developing wireless telegraphy.
Five years later, a team of British scientists conducted experiments with heating a platinum filament inside a vacuum tube. Despite the fact that platinum is a very expensive metal, and therefore platinum filament bulbs would not be available to everyone, it was the design of this bulb that formed the basis for the patent of the first electric bulb in 1841.
American inventor John W. Starr could claim to be the discoverer of the electric light bulb (in 1845 he integrated carbon filaments into an existing lamp design and quite successfully), but the next year he died of tuberculosis, and his colleagues did so and could not bring his undertakings to the end, since they did not possess either knowledge of his level or experience. A few years later, Joseph Swan applied Starr's achievements in his quest and in 1878 was able to assemble the first working prototype of a modern lamp and became the first person to light his home with electricity.
Meanwhile, American inventor Thomas Edison continued to work on improving carbon filaments. By 1880, he managed to extend the life of such a bulb to 1,200 hours and to produce up to 130,000 copies of such bulbs a year.
In the midst of all these events, a man was born, who eventually created the very "eternal" light bulb, which was mentioned in the introductory paragraph.
Adolphe Chaillet was born in 1867 in Paris at the height of the rapid growth of light industry in France. At the age of 11, he started working for the small firm of his father, a Swedish immigrant, in a light bulb company. He studied quickly, became seriously interested in physics and subsequently graduated from the Academy of Sciences in France and Germany. After several years spent designing fibers for a large German energy company, he moved to the United States.
For some time he worked for the already mentioned General Electrics, and then, using his fame as a brilliant electrician and engineer, he managed to find financial support for his own company - Shelby Electric Company. Although Chaie's success in the lamp industry was already widely known, he still needed to prove to the American public from scratch that his products shine brighter and longer. Risking his own reputation, he embarked on a daring experiment: Chaie placed his bulbs and those of a market-leading company side by side, plugged them in and gradually built up the voltage. From this impromptu competition, which he staged in public, Adolf emerged victorious and instantly attracted public attention to his product: they were the only ones left to burn, while the rest simply exploded.
Chaie's success came from his own invention: coiled carbon filaments.
Citing these advances, Shelby said their bulbs last 30% longer and 20% brighter than any other light bulb in the world. The company soon experienced overwhelming success: According to Western Electrician, Shelby Electric Company received so many orders on March 1 that it needed to scale up its plant and work day and night. By the end of this year, they were able to double their lamp production from 2,000 to 4,000 per day.
The advantage of Shelby lamps was so obvious that even the most skeptical of minds were in no doubt.
Over the next decade, the company continued to introduce new products, but after the market for lighting products expanded significantly and new companies began to use more advanced technologies (tungsten filaments, etc.), Shelby Electric Company did not manage to adapt to the changed conditions and as a result were bought by General Electric, and the production of light bulbs was stopped.
Centenary light
75 years later, in 1972, the chief of the fire department of the California city of Livermore approached a local newspaper with a report that shocked everyone: he found a lonely hanging Shelby light bulb in the basement of a fire department, which had been working continuously for decades. Firefighters themselves have long treated this light bulb as a kind of legend, a local landmark, but for certain no one knew exactly how long this light was already on and where it came from at all. Mike Dunstan, a young reporter for the Tri-Valley Herald, took to investigating the details of the story, and what he eventually unearthed was equally interesting and exciting.
After tracing the history of this light bulb through dozens of oral stories and written evidence, Dunsten determined that the light bulb was purchased in the late 1890s by a certain Dennis Bernal, who at that time owned the first energy company in the city - Livermore Power and Water Co. Following the sale of the company, Dennis donated this bulb to the local fire department. Now this sounds a bit comical, but you need to remember that at that time only 3% of all homes in the United States were lit with electricity, and light bulbs were a real hot commodity.
At first, for several months, the light bulb simply lay in the basket where the firefighting equipment was kept. Then she was hanged in the building of the city hall, but she did not stay there for long and returned to the fire department again. Since then, according to the current chief of the fire department, this light was very rarely extinguished, except during the period when the fire department was rebuilt: then all electricity was turned off for a week. It happened that the light was turned off several times, and in 1976 the light bulb was completely transported to the new building of the fire station. It sounds incredible at all, but a whole crowd of people watched the process of re-installing the lamp. At some point it seemed that the light bulb had burned out, but the electricians turned the switches, and it again illuminated the whole neighborhood with a bright light.
In the room where the light bulb was placed, video surveillance was carried out to make sure that the lamp would not go out over time and if it was able to work uninterruptedly for a whole day. Even then, it was treated as a miracle, but after the craftsmen organized an online broadcast and everyone and everyone began to observe the work of the light bulb, it turned into a cult.
At some point, the lamp went out and everyone decided that this was the end of the story, but after 9.5 hours it turned out that it was not the lamp that burned out, but the wiring. The wires were replaced and the light turned on again. As a result, this Shelby legend was able to survive not only the wiring, but also three CCTV cameras.
This legendary light bulb shines to this day, but, according to eyewitnesses, it gives very little light: only 4 watts. However, the entire fire brigade treats this tiny glass ball like a porcelain doll. “Nobody wants the light to go out,” former fire chief Gary Stewart once said. "If that happens, it won't be a very good end to my career."
They don't do them the way they used to.
The longevity of this light bulb aroused the interest of many, and everyone tried to uncover the secret of this device. The fire department even came from the famous TV show "Mythbusters", but the answer was never found.
Some, like David Tse, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, are more skeptical and consider the whole story of the eternal lightbulb an absurd fiction. Others, like engineering student Henry Slonsky, on the other hand, are convinced of the truth of the story and explain the long life of the light bulb by the fact that things were done better in those days.
In 2007, physics professor Debora M. Katz from Annapolis purchased a similar light bulb that hangs in the fire department, and conducted a series of experiments trying to find out what makes it different from modern lamps and explains such an enviable longevity.
The first thing she noticed was the thread width. But it turned out that in both modern lamps and Shelby lamps, the filament width is approximately the same and is 0.08 mm.
Then the professor suggested that the whole thing is not in the width of the thread, but in its density: according to this indicator, Shelby bulbs exceeded modern ones by 8 times. Current designs use thinner tungsten filaments that provide more light and heat (40 to 200 watts). Deborah explains: “Imagine an animal with a slow metabolism. This is the Shelby light bulb. It gives less light, but lasts much longer. " Katz also does not exclude that the fact that the light bulb was rarely turned off may be the reason for the longevity. The on-off process has a negative impact on any mechanism, it wears out.
What does the industry think?
The average operating time of a modern incandescent lamp is 1,500 hours. LED bulbs last longer - 30,000 hours, but are therefore more expensive. The Shelby light bulb has been shining for 113 years, that is, about a million hours. Where could the manufacturers be mistaken that they shortened the working period of the device so much? Or maybe it was done on purpose?
The fact is that in the days when the Shelby Electric Company took off, marketing was focused on the durability of the product. That is why the Chaier company was so proud of the excellent quality of their products. But at the beginning of the 20th century, the emphasis in marketing shifts to the opposite pole and a completely different rhetoric begins to dominate, which should sound quite familiar to us: a product that does not wear out threatens business with collapse and bankruptcy. This idea was developed in the intentional, planned obsolescence of the product, when the manufacturing company deliberately shortens the life of the product, stimulating repeat sales.
In 1924, such large international companies as Osram, General Electric, Philips and several other companies founded the so-called Phoebus Cartel, an organization that set the standards for the production of light bulbs. But that was the public version. In fact, these companies have tackled the planned obsolescence problem. As a result, the duration of the light bulb was reduced to 1,000 hours (although Edison reached 1,200 hours a decade ago), and anyone who introduced products that did not meet these standards could be fined.
This continued until the beginning of the Second World War. But for these 20 years, this organization could easily have hindered research into more durable lamps.
Conclusion
There is no evidence to indicate that modern light bulb manufacturers are deliberately making inferior products, so the issue of planned obsolescence is highly controversial today.
One way or another, but the volume of production of traditional incandescent lamps is declining all over the world. More efficient now are halogen lamps, LED, compact fluorescent lamps, magnetic induction headlights. But not one of them is still close to the record of the light bulb that still hangs in the basement of the fire department and refuses to go out.
Edison's oldest non-burning 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 the 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), at home page which you can contemplate the online broadcast of an amazing light source. A webcam installed specifically 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. Blown glass for 60 watt light bulb 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 to Edison.
The secret to the longevity of the "centenary lamp"
The unusually high resource of the old woman is explained by the fact that in those days the 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 no secret that today industrialists practice the so-called, that is, they produce any products, including light bulbs, with a deliberately short service life, so that they quickly fail, and buyers rushed 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 well remembers this).
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 it is economical in terms of the longevity of the lighting device.
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 ...
Is the centenary light on now? November 14th, 2014
In one of the fire departments of Livermore (California, USA), the oldest light bulb in the world has been operating since 1901, which serves as a technical backlight. The handmade 4-watt lamp is called "Centennial" and even has its own website where any Internet user can, in particular, follow it through a webcam - the device takes a fresh picture every 10 seconds.
See for yourself if the light is on and find out more about it ...
The secret to the durability of the lamp, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest in operation, is that it was almost never turned off. In all likelihood, the light bulb was installed in mid-June 1901, and turned off for only 22 minutes in 1976, when it was transferred to another facility for security reasons. By the way, the honorary escort during the transportation of the light bulb was headed by the captain of the fire department; it was also attended by other members of the unit and the police.
:-( script in LiveJournal does not work. Look here - http://voweb.net/blog/samaya_staraya_lampochka_smotret_39_veb_kameru/2008-10-22-166 or here http://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htmIt is noteworthy that the light bulb was manufactured by Shelby Electric Co not according to the drawings of the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, but in accordance with the work of his main competitor, Adolphe Scheie. A carbon filament serves as an incandescent element in the device, and the glass body is manually blown out. Deborah Katz, professor of physics at the American Naval Academy (Indianapolis), to explain the secret of lamp reliability, cites the results of a study of vintage Shelby Electric lamps. The fundamental differences between the products produced in those years were, firstly, the thickness of the filament (it is 8 times thicker than that of modern lamps), and the use of a semiconductor as it, most likely based on carbon. Note that when the light-carrying coil overheats in incandescent lamps produced today, it stops conducting electricity, while products from Shelby Electric burned more, the more the incandescent filaments were heated.
Thus, the lack of on-off cycles and uninterrupted operation were the main reasons for the longevity of the light bulb in the Livermore fire station. However, you must admit that this does not diminish the fact of the existence of a small, but quite real miracle, whose age has passed a hundred years.
Technologically, there is nothing unusual about the miracle of the Livermore eternal lamp. Other long-lived lamps are also known in the world. So, in the Guinness Book of Records published in 1970, she was mentioned working from a store in New York, made in 1912. At the moment, her fate, however, is unknown. But the Livermore Lightbulb is overseen by a whole public committee, which is called the Livermore Lightbulb Centennial Committee. The committee plans to keep the lamp working for as long as possible. So, perhaps, she will still overexpose all of us.
By the way, an ordinary light bulb only lasts about 1000 hours.
It is known that the main mask of light bulb burnout is the gradual wear of the tungsten filament. This filament is heated almost to the melting point of tungsten (3300 ° C), otherwise an intense light flux cannot be obtained. At this temperature, tungsten atoms in the crystal lattice vibrate intensively and some of them break off and go into space, settling on the walls of the flask. Gradually, the thread becomes thinner, and in the thinnest place the temperature crosses the melting line, the thread burns out. Obviously, a thicker filament must be installed to increase the life of the light bulb. But at the same time, to maintain the resistance of the thread, it is necessary to increase its length. A twofold increase in the diameter of the filament leads to an increase in the tungsten mass by a factor of 8. And tungsten is an expensive metal, so current light bulb manufacturers are trying to save it. But there is another reason for lamp wear that almost no one knows about. The fact is that the thin glass of the flask, when heated, allows gas to pass through. Tables are available for different glasses and different gases at different temperatures. For example, 1 cm2 of a glass surface with a thickness of 1 mm in 1 s and with a pressure difference of 1 mm Hg. passes at a temperature of 600 ° C 6.5 * 10 in (-12) degree cm3 of nitrogen (the main part of the air). Let's calculate the temperature of the bulb of a standard 40-watt bulb, in which the bulb surface area is 200 cm2, and the surface area of the tungsten filament is (approximately) 0.3 cm2, i.e. the difference is 660 times. Using the methodology of calculations according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law and taking into account that all the infrared radiation of the filament heats the flask (visible light is no more than 3%), we get the temperature of the flask of about 400 ° C (everyone can make sure that this is so by touching the flask glowing light bulb). Further, taking the thickness of the flask glass of the flask 0.5 mm, the pressure difference is 760 mm Hg. and a time of 1 year, we get the penetration of gas into the lamp of the order of 4-5 cm. In a few years, if the filament does not burn out, the lamp will be filled with gas, a gas discharge will occur, and with it ion bombardment of the filament. Then this thread will thin out faster. Thus, in order to create an incandescent lamp with a long service life, it is necessary to: install a thick tungsten filament, increase the surface area of the lamp bulb (this will lower the bulb temperature and reduce gas leakage), increase the thickness of the glass of the lamp bulb. Obviously, these conditions were met in the long-lived lamp. And current manufacturers do not want to fulfill these conditions, firstly, for reasons of economy (tungsten and glass), and secondly, manufacturers are simply not interested in producing "eternal" light bulbs (otherwise they will "burn out").