SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Seeing in the Dark

from the Economist

One of the most enduring urban myths is how the patent for an ever-lasting light bulb pioneered by a lone inventor was snapped up by a cartel of lighting manufacturers, who promptly secreted it away to protect their hugely profitable replacement business.

The fact is, lots of long-life bulbs have been invented over the years since Thomas Edison borrowed the best from the dozen or so different light-bulb designs patented during the early days of electrification and came up with a winner. Practically all the improvements in terms of life and brightness since then have come from the bulb-makers themselves. One of the most recent was Philips's incandescent light bulb that lasts for 60,000 hours.

As standalone products, though, few of the new designs have been able to compete--in terms of the inevitable trade-off between performance and price demanded by the marketplace--with the 1,000 hours or so of the tungsten-filament incandescent bulb. Most new bulb designs have either been relegated to specific roles or incorporated into mainstream products. But that all changed when the "twistie" or CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) arrived on the scene a decade ago.