How cool!

I always tell people that they have no idea how long something can last if it's engineered properly. Old stoplight bulbs are a good example. Or the phones leased by phone companies to their customers.

And I couldn't resist the calculation - that bulb has used 3,647 kWh in its lifetime, or roughly 4 months of the average American household consumption.

Ha! I thought that was only an urban legend, or that surely it had burnt out by now. Very amazing. I'm sure that modern bulbs are designed using much cheaper materials, and that 'planned replacement' played a role as well.

I know that it didn't take much arm-twisting to get owners of large buildings to switch to flourescent tube lights when they became available, since they used less energy, provided brighter light, and you didn't need a permanent 'bulb-replacement staff', like you did for incandescent lighting.

I've noticed that many cities are switching their traffic-signal lights to LED's for much the same reason. Paying a crew to replace bulbs costs several times more than the bulbs themselves. Unfortunately, what's good for the environment and economics, isn't always good for employment....

Ha! When I was in Poland this summer, I drank a bottle of juice made by a brand that prints random interesting facts on the inside of their lids. Well, the factoid on the lid I got was the story of this bulb! I kept the lid as a souvenir, but never expected I'd randomly hear about the bulb again. :)

Are the firetrucks afraid of the dark?

On a more serious note - is it the constant flow of electricity that keeps the bulb going? Would flipping it on and off destroy it?

I bet the lack of thermal cycling from leaving it on constantly does have something to do with its longevity, i wonder how much light it puts out for those 4 watts. Could it be more more efficient than most incandesents because it runs dimmer and cooler?

Ooooo. . . twisty-glowy!

I'm afraid the 'everlasting' light bulb story is a myth, or at least the consipracy theories about regular bulbs being deliberately 'hobbled' by greedy manufacturers are.

Although 'old faithful' may well last forever, the price of this is that it is HORRENDOUSLY inefficient.

The hotter the filament, the more light vs heat is output for a give power input. But the hotter the filament, the quicker it will burn out. Commercial light bulbs are therefore a compromise between reasonable energy efficiency, and longevity.

Where the cost to replace a bulb is very high (eg high up in tall ceilings, etc) it makes economic sense to use such long lasting bulbs.
Otherwise, this has no place on treehugger.

That's a Shelbyville idea lightbulb, not a Springfield idea lightbulb.

This light has used 3.64 MegaWatts hours so far keeping those firetrucks unafraid.

Is it plugged in to AC or DC current? I'm told that makes a world of a difference. It's the flicker of AC cycling which wear out filaments most. AC was designed to carry electricity long distance down a wire. Tesla wanted to revert back to DC for safety once arrived at destination but for Edison, the cost of re-convertion was too great. Conspiracy mongers might argue that it was also a way for rate payers to consume and pay for more juice! Today many of our appliances have built-in AC to DC converters (your computer for example) All RV appliances run on 12 volt DC. It would be interesting to do a longevity comparative study of similar appliances available both as 110 volt AC and 12 volt DC models.

There's another lightbulb I read about years ago in a theater in Chicago. It replaced an old gaslight at the turn of the century, and was the illumination over a backstage exit door. The thing kept burning until a couple years ago when a jackass with a ladder accidentally smashed it.

In theater terms, that's bad luck, by the way, to smash the "ghost light".

Some years ago, a friend of mine, who worked for the Department of Statistics for the state of Alabama, told me about how they had researched the conventional wisdom about turning the lights out when you leave a room. Please Note: This research was done over 20 years ago, and the technology has changed. Also note that the research in question was done for a government agency; the results would not necessarily be the same for a household, and would be somewhat suspect if applied to a business.

They took into account everything, which few people do; not only the cost of the replacement bulbs, but the labor costs of replacing them, and the decreased life span of bulbs that are cycled on and off frequently. The results were that, if a room was lit by incandescant bulbs, if you were going to be gone from a room for less than an hour, it was more economical to leave the lights on, and if it were lit by fluorescents, if you wre going to be gone for less than two hours, ditto.

The findings showed that cycling a light on and off was very hard on a bulb or fluorescent tube, and shortened their lifespans, requiring more frequent replacement (how many times have you seen a bulb burn out while it is burning? They almost always burn out when the bulb is turned on, due to thermal stress).

Obviously, the fact that Old Faithful has never been turned off has contributed to its longevity; apparently it is also running considerably below its theoretical power consumption.

I found a more recent study (1997) comparing power usage and life in linear fluorescent bulbs (US). The energy used for the 'inrush' when the light is activated is approximately 5 seconds' worth. The biggest factor in cost is lamp life. Each time the lamp is activated, it diminishes the life of the bulb by ~2.13 hours, agreeing with the 20-year-old study. For their example, a 20,000-hour bulb would last this long with 3-hour on-times, or 34,000 hours when continuously on.

"As Byron the Bulb's hours of use continue to climb, threatening to throw all the capitalist averages out of whack, the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies -- whose author knows we can spell that one out for ourselves -- the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies sends out a Berlin agent to unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what's happened." (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 650)