Kind: captions
Language: en
this is a video about things like cars
phones and light bulbs and an actual
conspiracy that made them worse
[Music]
this video was sponsored by nordvpn more
about them at the end of the video
i am outside livermore fire station
number six and in here they have the
longest continuously on light bulb in
the world it has been on for 120
years
since 1901 there it is huh
it's not even connected to a light
switch but it does have a backup battery
and generator so the big question is how
has this light bulb lasted so long it
was manufactured by hand not long after
commercial light bulbs were first
invented in yet it has been running for
over a million hours way longer than any
light bulb today is meant to last
a while 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 then intentionally made
them worse
but it turns out i was wrong
at least sort of
inventing a viable electric light was
hard i mean this is the typical
incandescent design which just involves
passing electric current through a
material making it so hot that it glows
you know less than five percent of the
electrical energy comes out as light the
other 95
is released as heat so these are really
heat bulbs which give off a little bit
of light as a byproduct you know the
temperature of the filament can get up
to 2800 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 1840s warren delarue
came up with the idea of putting the
filament in a vacuum bulb so there's no
oxygen to react with
by 1879 thomas edison had made a bulb
with a cotton thread filament that
lasted 14 hours
other inventors created bulbs with
platinum filaments or other carbonized
materials and gradually the lifespan of
bulbs increased
the filaments changed from carbon to
tungsten which has a very high melting
point and by the early 1920s average
bulb lifetimes were approaching 2000
hours with some lasting 2 500 hours
but this is when lifetimes stopped
getting longer and started getting
shorter
in geneva switzerland just before
christmas 1924 there was a secret
meeting of top executives from the
world's leading light bulb companies
philips 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's 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 dominant in a particular part of
the world the biggest threat they all
faced was from longer lasting light
bulbs for example in 1923 osram sold 63
million light bulbs but the following
year they sold only 28 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 1 000 hours
cutting the existing average almost in
half
but how could each company ensure that
the other companies would actually
follow the rules and make 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 had to send in
sample bulbs from their factories
and they were tested on big test stands
like this one
if a bulb lasted significantly longer
than a thousand hours well then the
company was fined if a bulb lasted
longer than three thousand hours well
the fine was two hundred swiss francs
for every thousand bulbs sold
and there are records of these fines
being issued to companies but how do you
make a worse 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 filaments 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 1934 the average
lifespan was just
1205 hours
and just as they had planned sales
increased for cartel members by 25
percent in the four years after 1926
and even though the cost of components
came down the cartel kept prices
virtually unchanged so they increased
their profit 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 did establish this screw thread as
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 consumers
so one of the reasons this light bulb
has lasted so long is because it was
made before the cartel era
another reason is because the filament
has always been run at low power just
four or five watts it was meant to be a
night light for the fire station to
provide just enough light so that
firemen wouldn't run into things at
night
and the fact that it was always on
reduced the thermal cycling of the
filament and components limiting the
stress caused by thermal expansion and
contraction
the fibus cartel was initially planned
to last at least until 1955 but it fell
apart in the 1930s it was already
struggling due to outside competition
and non-compliance amongst some of its
members but the outbreak of world war ii
is really what finished it off so this
cartel was dead
but its methods survived to this day
there are lots of companies out there
that intentionally shorten the lifespan
of their products it's a tactic known
now as planned obsolescence
this was actually the subject of casey
neistat's first viral video all the way
back in 2003. thank you for calling
apple my name's ryan may i have your
first name please casey all right what
seems to be the issue today i have an
ipod that i bought about 18 months ago
and the battery is dead on it
18 months okay it's passed it's here
which basically means for um it'll
there'll be a charge of 255
plus a mailing fee to send it to us to
re to refurbish
to correct it but at that price you know
you might as well go get a new one
this video got millions of views in a
time before youtube or social media and
it spawned a class-action lawsuit which
apple settled out of court but it didn't
stop the company from practicing planned
obsolescence after an ios update in 2017
users of older iphones found apps
loading significantly slower or the
device shutting down altogether
apple said they throttled performance to
protect the battery of older devices and
increase their longevity
of course that wouldn't be an issue if
the battery were replaceable
in a series of lawsuits that concluded
in 2020 apple was fined or reached
settlements to pay hundreds of millions
of dollars undoubtedly this amount pales
in comparison to the extra revenue they
generate by limiting the lifespan of
their products
but some would argue that planned
obsolescence isn't just about greed but
it's also good for everyone
during the great depression in the 1930s
when as much as a quarter of americans
were out of work and american real
estate broker bernard london proposed
mandatory planned obsolescence as a way
to get people back to work and lift
america out of the depression he wrote i
would have the government assign a lease
of life to shoes and homes and machines
when they are first created and they
would be sold and used within the term
of their existence definitely known by
the consumer
after the allotted time had expired
these things would be legally dead and
would be controlled by the duly
appointed governmental agency and
destroyed if there is widespread
unemployment
now this might sound like a wild fringe
idea but people were clearly afraid of
being put out of work by technological
progress and products that were too good
there was even a popular oscar-nominated
film about it this is the man in the
white suit from 1951
it's about a scientist who invents the
perfect fiber it won't stain or break or
fray i think i've succeeded in the
co-polymerization of amino acid residues
and carbohydrate molecules
both containing ionic groups
it's really perfectly simple the academy
award nomination was for best screenplay
i kid you not
anyway everyone is initially excited
about our hero's scientific discovery he
makes a suit out of the thread and it
has to be white because the fiber is so
stain resistant it can't even be dyed
but this is when trouble strikes the
factory owners realize they won't be
able to sell as much of this thread
because it's so durable and the workers
worry it'll put them out of a job well i
got you scientists leave things alone
what about my bitter washing when
there's no washing to do
this is when you get the climactic scene
where factory workers and factory owners
team up to chase down the scientist to
destroy him and his invention and
believe it or not this movie may have
been inspired by real events in the
1940s the synthetic fiber nylon replaced
silk in stockings and it was so durable
that the products became an overnight
sensation there were literal riots when
women tried to get their hands on them
when the manufacturers realized they had
made the product too good they didn't
destroy the fiber but they did follow
the example of the phoebus cartel they
instructed their engineers and
scientists to find ways to weaken the
product to shorten its lifespan so
people would have to buy more
now it seems like consumers are finally
fighting back against planned
obsolescence in the european union and
in over 25 states in the u.s there's
proposed legislation to enshrine the
right to repair
these laws would force manufacturers to
make it easier to repair their products
they would have to provide information
and access to parts so you could replace
a battery or fix a cracked screen at a
third-party repair shop without voiding
your warranty
so if the right to repair does become
law does that mean artificial
obsolescence will be gone for good
sadly no because there is one last thing
manufacturers can use to make their
products obsolete which is you
henry ford released the first
mass-market car the model t in 1908 and
he envisioned it like a workhorse an
affordable tool that wouldn't wear out a
bit like the everlasting light bulb in
1922 ford said we want the man who buys
one of our cars never to have to buy
another we never make an improvement
that renders any previous model obsolete
but by 1920 55 of american families
already owned a car
nearly everyone that could afford one
had one
and that same year there was a small
economic downturn driving down sales for
both ford and general motors
in 1921 dupont the chemical and paint
company took over the controlling share
in general motors
and they started experimenting with
painting cars different colors
up until then henry ford had said you
could have whatever color you like so
long as it's black
it took a couple years of testing but in
1924 gm released their first cars in
different colors and soon after they
introduced a trick that feels very
familiar now
each new year they would introduce cars
in different colors
the goal wasn't just to make ford's
model t look outdated but to make their
own cars feel outdated every year
encouraging customers to trade in their
old cars for shiny new ones
years later gm's head of design harley
earl candidly discussed his role in
creating what he called dynamic
obsolescence
our big job is to hasten obsolescence in
1934 the average car ownership span was
five years now which was 1955 it is two
years
when it is one year we will have a
perfect score
by the time he said this general motors
was the most valuable company in the
world and it sold half of all vehicles
purchased in the u.s every year
[Music]
these days the world's most valuable
company apple seems to have copied
directly out of this playbook i mean new
styles every year check new special
colors every year check
marginal technological improvement
check i mean is this useful innovation
or just a gimmick
the inspiration for general motors and
hence for apple comes from fashion where
real innovation is all but impossible so
the only way to make people feel the
urgency to get out there and buy is to
create styles that last but one season
the trouble then is you run through
these styles too quickly and then what
are you supposed to do we'll just
recycle the styles from a few decades
ago
the iphone also shows this recycling
trend i mean just look at the way the
edges were initially rounded and then
they were squared off and then they were
rounded again and now they're squared
off and how much do you want to bet that
the iphone 14 has rounded edges i think
the point is that with design and
styling there is no best there's only
different which is apparently enough to
remind us that we don't have the latest
and greatest and so we have to rush out
and keep buying
the only type of obsolescence we should
support is technological which brings us
back to the light bulb you know in the
last 20 years light bulbs have gone from
incandescent which was basically
unchanged for 100 years to compact
fluorescent and now to led
these use just a tenth the energy and
can last anywhere from 10 to 50 times
longer
yeah that's pretty bright so you're more
likely to sell your house than to have
to replace an led bulb that you've
installed inside it
so we've finally reached the point of
what is essentially an everlasting light
bulb
[Music]
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