Guess how many years this light bulb has been burning. Go on -- take a guess.
No.
Nope -- way longer than that.
Nuh uh -- not even close.
Find this clip at MSNBC.com
The Livermore, CA Fire Department's Centennial Light is a four watt hand blown light bulb with a carbon filament that has been burning almost continuously as a firehouse night light since 1901.
Read the above line again and catch your breath -- it wasn't a typo: the bulb has been burning more than 107 years, which makes it slightly older than Hugh Hefner, and considerably brighter and more useful.
Although quite bright, the bulb is very shy: it doesn't give interviews. Still, the bulb's press has included recognitions from the Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, CNN, NBC, NPR, and newspapers across the country and around the world, as far away as New Zealand.
The bulb is monitored by the Livermore Pleasanton Fire Department "Bulb Cam", which refreshes every ten seconds.
Why this sudden fixation on lighting? Because lately, in self defense, I've had to take a crash course in the qualities of different types of light bulbs lately.
Would you believe the light fixtures in my house require a minimum of 13 different KINDS of light bulbs? This would include two sizes of fluorescent tubes; tiny (and costly) plug-in halogens for a six bulb imported-from-Italy-and-thus-not-returnable chandelier on which only five bulbs have worked since it was installed (but it's pretty, and isn't that what really matters?); then there are the flood lights, the spotlights, the small and medium makeup lights (when I wear makeup, which is rare, I usually put it on in the car in order to have a reason why it looks so bad), the track lights and the domed ceiling fixtures.
Clearly the people who designed my home were crazy. Hi Tricia. Hi Tom. Big kisses!
Half the lights in our house are controlled by a Lutron lighting system (this is not a plug -- no pun intended), which allows us to light entire areas of our home with the press of a single button anywhere in the house.
As a guilt-ridden conscientious consumer, I've gradually been making the transition to compact fluorescent bulbs which, as everyone surely knows (sorry -- didn't mean to call you Shirley) have been mandated by the 2007 Energy Bill to replace incandescent bulbs in the next four to 12 years.
What's the difference between incandescent bulbs and fluorescent bulbs? For a complete explanation take a look at How Stuff Works.com:
"[I]ncandescent light bulbs ... have a very thin tungsten filament that is housed inside a glass sphere... Electricity runs through the filament. Because the filament is so thin, it offers a good bit of resistance to the electricity, and this resistance turns electrical energy into heat. The heat is enough to make the filament white hot, and the "white" part is light. The filament glows because of the heat -- it incandesces.
The problem with incandescent light bulbs is ... [h]eat is not light ... so all of the energy spent creating heat is a waste...
A fluorescent bulb uses a completely different method to produce light. There are electrodes at both ends of a fluorescent tube, and a gas containing argon and mercury vapor is inside the tube. A stream of electrons flows through the gas from one electrode to the other... These electrons bump into the mercury atoms and excite them. As the mercury atoms move from the excited state back to the unexcited state, they give off ultraviolet photons. These photons hit the phosphor coating the inside of the fluorescent tube, and this phosphor creates visible light...
A fluorescent bulb produces less heat, so it is ... four to six times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. That's why you can buy a 15-watt fluorescent bulb that produces the same amount of light as a 60-watt incandescent bulb."
So what's my problem? Why all this research and twaddle about the irreconcilable differences between incandescents and fluorescents? Check back tomorrow.
If you're still curious about the history of light bulbs click here and knock yourself out.
