The 123-year-old bulb still burning in livermore just outlived another security camera
While the rest of us swap LEDs every two years, a carbon-filament ghost in Livermore’s fire station has been sipping electrons since William McKinley occupied the White House. The Centennial Light—dim as a smoker’s match yet stubborn as unpaid rent—hit the 1.2-million-hour mark last winter, outliving three generations of surveillance gear tasked with live-streaming its eternal glow. One more webcam died in March; the bulb didn’t flinch.
The cartel that dimmed the world
In December 1924, Osram, Philips and General Electric raised champagne in Geneva and lowered every future bulb’s life to 1,000 hours. Engineers called it the Phoebus cartel; accountants called it Christmas. Overnight, a Shelby Electric Company carbon filament that once cruised past 2,500 hours became a fairy-tale. The new “standard” halved copper usage, doubled sales, and—because hotter filaments yield whiter light—let manufacturers sell the same wattage twice.
Market filings from the era show the cartel fining members whose lamps survived too long. A 1929 internal memo—uncovered in a Basel archive by a TU Berlin grad student—slaps Associated Electrical Industries with a 450 Swiss-franc penalty for “excessive durability in sample 6.” The bulb lasted 1,573 hours. Crime paid.
Why your leds still die young
Fast-forward a century: diodes etched on gallium-nitride wafers promise 50,000 hours on paper, yet Amazon reviews howl at two-year failures. The trick isn’t conspiracy now—it’s thermodynamics on a tight BOM. Strip two cents of heat-dissipating aluminum, swap ceramic for FR-4 PCB, and the junction temperature climbs 18 °C. Every 10 °C rise halves the phosphor’s life. Voilà: a 30,000-hour emitter becomes a 7,000-hour consumer product that still looks “bright” on the shelf.
Meanwhile, Livermore’s relic hums at 4 watts, filament sagging like an old hammock, producing more infrared than visible photons. It’s a night-light for history, and it mocks every spec sheet I’ve ever read.
The Centennial Light won’t live forever; carbon sublimates, even in a near-vacuum. But long after the last “smart” bulb has phoned home its own obsolescence, that glass teardrop in California will still be trickling electrons, a quiet witness to the moment industry learned that darkness is a renewable resource.