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The Future Of Light - Organic LEDs
pmbarth writes "The filament based or fluorescent light technology has not changed for a long time. However, there appear to be new lighting technologies on the horizon. Personally, how cool would it be to just 'have light', and not have a bright light-source to contend with? Bye-bye incandescents!"
Seems like a rather negative way of looking at it -- I'd say they're designed to go on working for a certain amount of use. And it's a miracle of engineering that incandescent bulbs last as long as they do. When you flip that switch an incandescent bulb filament ramps from room temperature to several thousand degrees in a fraction of a second. They had to refine the design to withstand this severe thermal cycling as many times as possible before it breaks. And they have to restrict the materials to ones that not only won't melt at that temperature, but that evaporate slowly enough. The evaporation thing is a particular problem -- not only does it eat into the filament, but said metal winds up condensed on the glass envelope, which keeps the light from getting out.
I don't think the incandescent bulb is a good candidate for significant improvement. It's a crude idea, and it's a miracle that they kept it from going obsolete this long.