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Edison Would Have Loved New Light Bulb Law, Says His Great-Grandson
New submitter futuristic writes with a link to Thomas Edison's great-grandson's take on Thomas Edison and the alleged demise of the incandescent light bulb. From the article: "My great grandfather's 100-watt incandescent will be replaced with new energy-efficient versions, including CFLs, LEDs, and — yes — new and improved incandescent bulbs. ... And my great-grandfather wouldn't have it any other way."
Absolute bullshit. As much as any sensible man should support the new lightbulb law, Edison was *not* a sensible man. All you need to know to figure out his stance on old outdated technology versus new, superior technology is this: DC vs. AC, Edison vs. Tesla.
...that had Thomas Edison been alive today, he would have held the patents on these assorted new lightbulbs.
Really?
Chances are he would have held one or more patents on the new light bulb so it would have been a source of income for him.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
was a thief and a crook. Big deal.
...he just bought the patent from two Toronto inventors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Woodward_(inventor)
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field."
Well this is refreshing; it looks like the truth. Usually people cramming words into the mouths of the dead are self-serving, bullshit-spewing weirdos. Either that or maudlin, irrelevant losers.
This guy, on the other hand, is a university professor who appears to have actual research behind his claims. It goes against him, of course, that he's attempting to improve or revive his famous great-grandfather's reputation with this article, but the research looks real and I presume it's open to review.
How refreshing.
Let's also not forget that most old incandescent bulbs manufactured today are imports from China
From the article...
Where the hell do they think most of those CFL/LED bulbs are made? Sure as hell is not in the united states anymore... Lots of the incandescent were made here. They closed the plants. Not because they couldn't convert them. But because it was just cheaper to add to the ones in China/Mexico/Brazil...
To wave the patriot flag here is garbage. Its not. Its just business, of which Edison was one of the best of his time...
Fluff article. Just to toot how this is such a good thing. Where the jury is still out on that one. We will not know really for 10-15 years if this was a good idea or not. It looks on paper like a good idea. But as with many gov programs what looks good on paper in practice turns out to suck balls...
You can already get around the restrictions if you want an old fashioned light bulb, they're just called Heatballs instead. Two guys in Germany started marketing them as "heaters that fit into a light socket" last year after a similar law went through in the EU.
He'd be shocking animals to death with the new lightbulbs, suing Westinghouse and Tesla and everyone else, and in general acting like any other a$$hole - because that's what he was, and that's what he did, as well as cheating Tesla out of $$$ - all putting the "Con" in "Con Edison."
Let's say you save 200w for 6 hours per day by using a more efficient lightbulb. That's 1.2 kw hr per day, or roughly 4mJ.
Given that a gallon of gas weighs about 3 kg and therefore has about 120mJ of heating value, this saves the equivalent of about 4 oz of gasoline per day assuming 50% efficiency. Is legislation for is really warranted?
If they would fix the awful public transit in the SF bay area, we'd be saving something significant instead. Or if we had diesel cars, or stopped drinking bottled tap water.
"...How can inventor-entrepreneurs like Edison make a profit if every time they try to make a technological advance some nut in Congress pulls the rug out from under the them and their breakthroughs...?"
Oh yeah, I'm SHUURE Edison would be SO happy with the Federal Government placing a moratorium on the sale of an existing major product, one which at least half of all consumers prefer to the new. Rather than releasing both and letting the market decide.
/SARCASM
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Of course Edison would have loved modern lightbulbs -- what's not too like? Cleaner more aesthetically pleasing light drawing lower power. Of course they last longer, and don't break as easy so people buy less, but hey -- can't have everything right?
But -- if these lightbulbs had been invented by a competitor such as Tesla -- well, many household pets would have to lay down their lives to fight off this infernal contraption that is a peril and danger to us all.
Frankly, Edison was an asshole. Brilliant -- but an asshole nonetheless.
Edison fought against AC power distribution because his was DC.
But only because we've got technology they didn't back then. When it comes to long distance transmission, voltage is key because of Ohms law. The more current you have the bigger your conductor has to be to prevent loss.
Well transformers can easily and quite efficiently step up and down AC voltage. So you can have hundreds of thousands of volts, far more than you'd want in a home, over a distribution line. There was no equivalent technology for DC back when the current wars were going on.
Now there is, thyristors. They are solid state devices that do a good job of efficient DC-DC conversion. So it is possible today to do HVDC lines and indeed it is done. There are some advantages (like no skin effect).
Prior to that the best there was is mercury arc valves. Those worked and were used, but had some serious limits. Even then, they didn't come on the scene until about the 1920s, and the current wars were back in the 1880s.
So sure, if we redesigned the grid today, maybe DC would make sense, however there are some things that AC works really well for. Thing is, we didn't design it today, we designed it in the 1800s and back then, AC was it. Edison's DC plan called for there to be generators all over the place since long runs were out of the question. That is a shitty way to do things, not only because you don't want generators in your neighborhood but because as with many things, generators scale with efficiency in terms of size.
To have a functioning society you have to accept that things you are for or against shouldn't always be written into law. It is possible to be for more efficient light bulbs but be against throwing people in jail who don't share your values (all laws are effectively backed by imprisonment). I think society would be better without Apple products, but it would worse with laws banning them. We need to grow up from this fascism and change people's minds with facts and information rather than making things illegal that we don't like.
All of this is speculation of what a long dead man would have liked.
So, I'll jump in here. I think Edison would have masturbated to the new light bulbs, say that they violate one of his patents, sued everyone making them for billions, and go home and make sweet sweaty love to a farm animal. Oh, and then take off in his space ship that he had hidden for decades and fly off to the planet that Elvis went to after his last Burger King visit.
I'm all for energy efficiency, but I've yet to find a CFL or LED that feels as good as the light from an incandescent bulb. It just brings the most natural experience. The best ones I've seen are the 100W lamps with neodymium (purple) coating which corrects the spectrum to be more white. There's also 60W versions of those, but as the filament burns cooler, it creates a bit too yellow/red light.
I've also tried a plethora of different CFLs including the "hifi" full spectrum ones, but they always give a bit of synthetic experience. The spectrum is still lacking. The modern HF ones are flicker-free, but I maybe can still sense some kind of subliminal flicker. Things like that. They just give the body a message that "something is wrong". Then again, there might be some other industrial high-power lamp types that give good results.
So, I've been in search for great lighting in the same sense like someone seeks the ultimate IPS display. After all I would probably be better off just moving to some sunny country. :)
sure, be cost effective and energy efficient...but NOT efficient upon the environment (ie. mercury). As a lighting distributor, I constantly run into the issue of consumers unaware of the fact that they need to recycle their old bulbs to hazardous waste instead of just throwing them in the trash.
Plus, there's also the aspect that not all FLs, CFLs, LEDs satisfy the consumer's needs. There are applications in which are not suitable (due to personal preference and colour rendering and/or kelvin).
Also, who is it necessary that this becomes a law in the first place? WTF ever happened to "the land of the FREE", it seems rather enslaved by laws to me. The public should be able to choose what they deem appropriate for themselves.
Heh. That's pretty much what I was going to say.. If he had the patent(s) on it, he'd praise it as the best thing since ... well ... the light bulb. If he didn't, he'd be pushing all the reasons that it was horrible and dangerous.
That's the way he played.. Otherwise, we would be praising the successor to the Joseph Swan light bulb.
Patents are a bitch, and Edison was the original patent troll.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
... that his great grandfather actually DIDN'T INVENT the incandescent lightbulb...
I had no idea there was going to be a ban on 100W incandescent bulbs. I currently have 4 150W bulbs and they're in use as modeling lights for my AlienBee strobes. They work well cause they provide really good reference lighting, they're cheap ($2), I haven't replaced them in the 4 years I've had them and they're fully dimmable. I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing if I have to replace them, anyone have any experience with that? Are there replacements that will be just as bright that will work with a dimmer or do I just have to hope these bulbs never die?
And my great-grandfather wouldn't have it any other way.
[citation needed]
They're more energy efficient not "cheaper here and now".
The market can't solve all your problems. It can only find local extrema. You moron.
Actually, that would have been "Consolidated Edison" eventually shortened to "ConEd". Otherwise, you're absolutely right. How much did he cheat the world from, by not funding Tesla? We'll never know.
Well, unless the conspiracy theory that Tesla managed to make himself immortal, and moved to Argentina to pursue high energy experiments for gravity control and space travel are true. I kid you not, I picked up a really good book on Tesla. The last two chapters went into this wild conspiracy stuff. What an awful way to ruin a really informative book. I was under the distinct impression that the publishers read the first few chapters, and confirmed the facts, but no on bothered to read the whole thing before it went to press.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The idea that someone's great-grandson should be taken as some kind of authority on what his grandfather would think -- which in ITSELF is just an "appeal to authority," void of any real meaning.
So this is an appeal to an appeal of authority. Or is it an appeal to authority of an appeal to authority? Whatever, it's meaningless.
- aj
No he became a vampire and moved to Canada to become an actor - wouldn't you if you had a chance of a snog with Amanda tapping ;-)
What a stupid article and premise!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Doesn't Warren Buffet want to change the tax laws so he makes less money?
Well you can believe (A) what a man says in political speeches or (B) what a man does in reality. In reality Buffet uses loopholes to engineer his personal pay in order to avoid taxes. He pays himself in dividends, which is taxed at a lower rate than regular income. If he wanted to pay the same taxes as his secretary he could pay himself in money, an ordinary paycheck, the same way she and nearly everyone else is paid.
Buffet favors an inheritance tax but he then gives all his money to the Gates foundation, again avoiding taxation.
Classic 1% behavior. Do as I say not as I do. Reminds me of Senator Ted Kennedy, all pro environment and green energy until someone wants to put up wind turbines that can be viewed from his beachfront property.
Edison was a liar and a thief, stole Tesla's ideas, and screwed over his employees even when they did most of the work.
LEDs act as a rectifier, if you put enough LEDs and other diodes in series you can run them off your 100-200V AC circuit directly. What probably has a heatsink is the resistor added to current limit.
Banning them outright is indeed silly. Incandescents work very well for things like ovens, outdoor porch lights in -40 weather. Also they really are more environmentally friendly in places like a closet that you only turn the light on a few times a day for maybe a minute or two, where a fluorescent bulb would never warm up and have its lifespan significantly shortened by frequent starts.
Now a room that is lit for an hour or more a day, yeah for sure I ditched all my incandescents a long time ago and haven't regretted it, even in fixtures with glass covers. The thing I like most about compact fluorescents is that I can get a much brighter bulb with less heat and watts. Where I'd have a 60 watt bulb in a lamp before (hate indirect lighting!), I can no put a 75 or 80 virtual watt CF. Little 25 apparent watt fluorescent bulbs are excellent in a reading lamp. This said, I'm not convinced they are actually cheaper and I can't say they've saved me money. They don't seem to significantly outlast incandescents, and while they do use less electricity, the savings are not that much compared to TVs, Computers, Fridges, Stoves, Furnaces, AC, etc.
My shop is lit with a row of fluorescent tubes and a bunch of very large (200 watt) incandescent bulbs. Winters are brutal on the fluorescent bulbs. They flicker a lot while the ballast warms up. As well we replace more fluorescent tubes each year in the shop than bulbs (why would cold affect the tubes?). Which is nice because the bulbs are 20 feet overhead. Getting reliable, energy-efficient replacements for these bulbs would be very nice but I haven't seen any yet.
Tesla, represent.
They do not "pump out radiation and mercury vapor". They give off EM radiation, aka "light" and "RF", not ionizing radiation, and their RF emissions are fairly small. They contain mercury vapor, but it doesn't leave the glass tube unless you break the tube. The amount of mercury in a CFL is far less than the amount of mercury put into the atmosphere by burning coal to power an incandescent bulb. Therefore, even if you break a CFL bulb after using it, it will put less mercury into the environment than the extra coal burned to power equivalent incandescent bulbs for an equivalent duration. If you recycle the CFL, it puts even less mercury into the environment.
In short, your post is pure bunk.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Edison would have loved LEDs and hated CFLs. LEDs are always DC and CFL always AC inside.
He'd be shocking animals to death with the new lightbulbs, suing Westinghouse and Tesla and everyone else, and in general acting like any other a$$hole - because that's what he was, and that's what he did, as well as cheating Tesla out of $$$ - all putting the "Con" in "Con Edison."
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? doesn't anyone know their history anymore? it was Edison that was frying animals and pushing for the electric chair because he was sure it would discredit Tesla and AC power and since he had DC patented up the ass he stood to make a fortune if he pulled it off. its pretty common knowledge that even after it was proven that with the tech of the time DC just wouldn't scale Edison was pushing for "neighborhood generators' belching out coal smoke to power a couple of blocks rather than admit while DC had its uses it wasn't gonna work long distance.
Sorry to burst anyone's bubbles but while Edison was a brilliant man he was also as ruthless as they come and had NO problem with deep roasting animals and people just to try to ruin a competitor. Hell Gates and Jobs didn't have nothing on Edison as i can't really picture Jobs having someone bashed to death with an IBM PC to "prove" they were unsafe.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
My shop light (wire cage lamp on a stick) could be populated with LEDs or CFLs, but I it's a lamp that sees rough use. I drop it, hit it with two-by-fours, and drop my drill on it all the time. LED bulbs are too expensive to justify in a location where they'll get abused, and CFLs contain mercury so it seems irresponsible to put them in a place where I expect to regularly break bulbs.
Fuck you Congress, for thinking you're smarter than I am. For the record, all of my household bulbs are LED and I love them.
They do not "pump out radiation and mercury vapor". They give off EM radiation, aka "light" and "RF", not ionizing radiation, and their RF emissions are fairly small. They contain mercury vapor, but it doesn't leave the glass tube unless you break the tube.
A significant fraction of people throw used-up light sources in the trash. They just don't care about releasing some mercury into their local environment. If they ever get ill, the'll sue a CFL manufacturer perhaps, but their behavior won't change.
The amount of mercury in a CFL is far less than the amount of mercury put into the atmosphere by burning coal to power an incandescent bulb. Therefore, even if you break a CFL bulb after using it, it will put less mercury into the environment than the extra coal burned to power equivalent incandescent bulbs for an equivalent duration. If you recycle the CFL, it puts even less mercury into the environment.
In short, your post is pure bunk.
If you are unlucky enough to rely on coal power. Many people aren't in that situation.
No, because it is impossible to prove. I call it the post-mortem fallacy: where someone argues a position is held by another who was dead long before he or she could have had any opinion on the topic. We don't know what opinion Edison would have had on the new law.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
What they should do instead is impose a tax that makes CFLs and LEDs price competitive and use the tax money to subsidize domestic LED production.
Edison would have eventually supported it, but he would have electrocuted a few elephants first.
Far too many people want to save a buck today, even if it costs them more in the long run. LEDs are GREAT. I love them. As my CFLs go, I am replacing them with LED lights. They are extremely efficient (if you get the right ones), provide full light instantly, do not suffer form being turned off and on and last forever (like 10-20 years no problem).
However, they are expensive. When I redo the lights in my kitchen from T8 florescents to LEDs it'll be about $360. Now I won't have to replace them again for decades, nor the ballasts (LEDs don't use them) but it is a big upfront cost.
Same thing with single fixtures. An A19 replacement will run you $20-30. Compare that to incandescents that can be had for less than a buck. Now in the long run, you'll save plenty of money. You'll replace that incandescent 50+ times before you replace the LED, not to mention the power savings.
However people see the price tag, get whiny, and buy the cheap one.
So they are trying to force things. It has been done with many other items as well. Like air conditioners. Lowest efficiency you can buy now is a 13 SEER. Buying more makes sense, those things last forever (they usually come with 10 year warranties and they'll often last 20 or 30 no problem, sometimes longer) and over the life of it the power savings are immense. However they had to legislate it because people loved to cheap out and buy low end ones.
I remember at the apartment I used to live at the cooling bills were killer. Thin windows, shitty insulation, and a tiny little A/C that was extremely low efficiency. Now owning my own place, I have the highest efficiency two stage I could get my hands on. So very worth it. When I replaced my older unit (which was still reasonably efficient) I cut my power bill to 66% of what it used to be.
So the laws are to try and drag people who can't do math, who won't think long term, or who just don't care (like the apartment complex, we paid the power so they wanted whatever cost them the least) in to more efficiency.
In the long run, it is better not just for the environment, but for your wallet and your life. It's pretty damn awesome not having to change light bulbs, particularly those ones that you need a ladder for.
The best motors these days are ECM, electronically commutated motors, and they are DC. They have to rectify the AC signal internally before it is switched. They provide superior control and efficiency to standard single phase AC motors. Thus, you find them on higher end gear. Two things I got somewhat recently that feature them are my washer and my air conditioner. The washer uses it primarily for speed control. It is a direct drive motor and can do all kinds of different speeds, reverse direction, and so on. In the AC it is largely efficiency, though also to provide superior speed control.
They do cost more, in part because they need a rectifier, but they are the way to go for efficient motors.
> Any sensible man would know we shouldn't have such stupid laws. If CFLs/LEDs/etc are so superior, why do we need a law banning them?
There *isn't* a law banning them! There's a law which sets new efficiency requirements. The only reason incandescent bulbs are "banned" under that law is because they're too inferior to meet those standards.
This is like having the D students complain when a school changes the minimum passing grade from D to C because they don't know how to get anything higher than a D. Which pretty well describes incandescent bulbs when it comes to efficiency....
He'd be more concerned about getting out of the damn box in the ground.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Who gives a flying fuck what a descendant of Edison thinks?
Why should we be even slightly interested in this shit?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Tesla was amazing. Edison was a huge jerk-hole. There's a lot of detail that has already been said supporting my position. I just wish the rest of the world would learn about the two and how we have Tesla to thank for AC power and a lot more.
The problem is that Tesla's story also includes his vision for FREE ENERGY. If you can't put a meter on it, you can't add it to the history books... or something like that.
You can feed AC to an LED, it'll just only light up part of the time.
The only thing Edison loved was his own voice, and his own face in the mirror.
Only by pretending to have invented the mirror could he be made more happy. Luckily for him, he was easily ignorant and stupid enough to achieve such a delusion.
They give off EM radiation, aka "light" and "RF", not ionizing radiation, and their RF emissions are fairly small.
Ever try listening to an amplitude modulated radio signal (at just about any frequency) with baskets full of these damn CFLs (and other 'new' ways of generating light) running in the neighborhood? It sucks. Oh, I forgot, AM radio is 'old-fashioned' and should go the way of incandescent light bulbs. Sorry, I still like listening to 7MHz at night. Or transmitting there... /Funny, my captcha is "ampere".
I am paying for the electricity therefore I get to decide how it is used. I can put the heater outdoor if I want. It is called freedom of choice. By limiting it you are slowly creating more and more planned economy, which as shown by theory and practice is hugely inefficient and thus not able to support our society, let alone generate anyprogress.
Well, unless the conspiracy theory that Tesla managed to make himself immortal, and moved to Argentina to pursue high energy experiments for gravity control and space travel are true. I kid you not, I picked up a really good book on Tesla. The last two chapters went into this wild conspiracy stuff.
Wait, what?!? Are you trying to say that The Prestige was not a true story?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Wasn't the mercury already "in the environment"? From where else could it have come?
Like he fucking knew his great grandfather well enough to speak for him now.
Edison died 80 years ago. So, unless this guy is 102 or so, he didn't really know him. I find it more likely that this guy is just an eco whacko douche who happened to win the genetic lottery and be descended from Edison.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
She's cute, but totally my type. That, and her horrible accent on that show makes me cringe. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Well, it's the closest that Hollywood has managed to come to a biography in years... :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The light bulb companies still adhere to the, "Incandescent buIbs must not live longer than 1000 hours" super-secret corporate mandate. -When it is entirely possible to make bulbs that last 20,000+ hours. GE is a rat bastard company among rat bastard companies.
So light bulbs are already profitable business. Why force a switch? Is it about money?
Maybe; if you've noticed, the tech in those new bulbs is always improving, which means everybody is still buying lots and lots of much more expensive bulbs, and replacing them. Bulbs are now on the same kind of development cycle that computers and operating systems are on; very expensive and perceived as old-tech after a couple of years. So yeah, that equals big $$.
But I think it goes deeper and darker than that. I think money is just the carrot.
To drive CFL bulbs, you end up producing a lot of EM pollution in the RF range, flooding the environment with automated brain-fog. (And btw, anybody who still doesn't understand how electromagnetic signals at non-ionizing levels can alter bio-chemistry, sorry, you're lost causes at this point.)
Just another bit of downward pressure on the cognitive functions of the population you want to keep controlled.
Feed 'em drugs, feed 'em carbs, feed 'em fear, keep 'em debt-slaved, put a couple of TVs in every home, and flood their living and work environments with the stupid-ray, imbedded in every phone, every computer and now every light socket.
Works like a charm. Obviously.
Oh yeah. And none of this has anything to do with so-called 'global warming'. Only the most truly stupid people still buy that line of crap.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? doesn't anyone know their history anymore?
/. ... When any amount of common sense indisputable fact is posted, it's usually marked troll or flamebait by The Armchair Committee of /., most of whom have spent years earning their PhDs at Assmad University. I think in retaliation, we should mark the retards' posts as "funny". At least that way, they'll have undivided attention, no matter how short lived or tongue-in-cheek it may be.
This is
What does Heywood Sloane do for a living? Unless he's doing similar things his great grandfather did, then he's really in no position to speak for Thomas Edison, relation or not. Just sayin'.
Are you saying someone's great grandson isn't the most unbiased source in information? ;)
Was Thomas Edison even alive to ever meet his great grandson? Even if he was it would have been when he was 5 years old, so I doubt he gained any great insight into his mind at that age.
I'm not drumk but I love incandescent bulbs too. I've tried many CFLs and none of them give warm light, none of them give full brightness immediately at power-on, none of them are mercury free, none of them handle cold temps well. We waste electricity in so many other ways, targeting incandescent lighting is a trivial battle. Anything that's "instant on" or uses a transformer ("wall wart") is a vampire sucking off energy and wasting it. Cell phone chargers or any kind of charger, cordless house phones, computers, video game consoles, TVs, VCRs, DVD/BR players, stereos, laptop chargers, monitors, printers, microwaves... these are only a sample of the vampires in your house.
You're looking at me funny, as if I'm... off..... topic... yeah.
However he may have had knowledge passed down via family members. Stories of the old man, seeing that he's the most famous member of your family, there were probably a lot of stories told about him. Maybe private journals/papers kept within the family. That might give him a little more insight than the average joe would have on Edison.
Among other things there is no CFL or LED replacement for lights in an existing oven. A blanket ban on incandescent bulbs is a pretty silly and draconian way to pretend to be green, and entirely pointless anyway as a lot of incandescents are being replaced no matter what the local laws say.
Actually most modern appliances do convert AC to DC to run the circuits within, some use DC motors too, my dishwasher and washing machine are totally DC shortly inside the rear casing.
So, my issues with the new law aren't even about my distaste for the government overreaching its bounds in my opinion (This isn't an issue where I feel it's worth the energy for that approach, no pun intended), but are simple SERIOUS health concerns with CFL's (which, like it or not, are the predominant energy-saving bulb on the market right now).
CFL's contain mercury, which, as any first grader knows, is toxic to humans (and most realize that it's also toxic to animals). Not toxic as in "will give you a stomachache", but toxic as in potentially deadly, teratogenic, and resulting in some serious fucked up brain and other organ issues. And yet, we're encouraging people to have these in their homes, where children and pets are often found, in addition to adults who simply don't realize that these bulbs contain mercury, or that it's an issue. I'm not usually one for MORE warning labels, but I am for accurate labeling, and from what I've noticed, there isn't very good information on this danger. If you've ever broken a light bulb, these things are potentially dangerous to you. Worth keeping in mind. LED's I have no issue with, but again, they're simply not the most common bulb...frankly, I think if you're going to ban anything, ban BOTH CFL's and Edison bulbs.
Other point: Epileptics. Fluorescent bulbs of any type are not so kind to these folk. I don't particularly feel comfortable further limiting the type of lighting choices they have at this point. Give us some time to get LED's a bigger market share, and maybe a few other options, and we'll talk. Til then, I'm not particularly fond of this law.
Finally, solar panels and LEDs could show how to use DC networks.
I think in retaliation, we should mark the retards' posts as "funny".
Have been for about 2 years.
and for medium size industrial facilities 480V - and yes some but not all are controlled by VFD;s. But you aren't going to run a facility on DC - it' easy and inexpensive to step voltage up and down with a transformer about 1K for a 35HP motor - if you were using dc a dc-dc inverter would not be as efficient, cost effective or (this is a big one) reliable.
Southern California was a different frequency than the rest of the US until the 1930's. The US goverement had to hire clock makers to switch out the AC motors - so the clock would keep time
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? doesn't anyone know their history anymore?
The post paints a very one sided picture. There will always be arguments over whether he was a great, or a grotesque man. Truth be told he was probably like most heroes and villains; a bit of both.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Let's say Edison did invent and he was Tesla incarnate.
Even in this imaginary case who cares what Edison _would_ have said on this, especially if it comes from his distant descendant, who has no credibility in anything, as far as I know?
Edison was solving completely different problem.
This obsession with celebrities and big names is shameful, and people should shy from it.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
How so? While there can be disputes as to his overall character what happened with the electric chair and his frying animals using AC to "prove" it was a menace is well documented, most by Edison's own hand in fact. There is NO dispute the electric Chair was Edison, there is NO dispute he fried several animals including an elephant (there is even pictures to document that) and there is NO dispute that Edison long after everyone else realized that DC wouldn't scale was pushing for neighborhood generators rather than admit that it would take AC to power something the size of New York. IIRC there are still a couple of places in Boston and NYC where power is converted to DC because they were some of the original blocks set up by ConEd to run on neighborhood generators.
Nobody is saying the man wasn't brilliant, nobody is saying he didn't change the world as we know it, its simply pointing out that he was neither saint nor sinner and at his core he was no different than Jobs or Gates or Ellison, a ruthless businessman that had NO problem with doing something nasty to further his own goals. How would YOU explain away or condone slowing roasting a man alive, to the point his flesh literally begins to smolder and which one witness said "Would have been more humane to have taken an axe to him" simply to "prove" that a rival's design was too dangerous for the home? If that ain't ruthless frankly I don't know what would qualify for that title.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In cold climates, the incandescent light works, whereas the mini-florescent bulbs will not start. In my home, when the temperature is cold outside, my heating is with electricity. The incandescent light replaces the toaster element, and provides both heat and light. It also works at -20C temperatures, for outside lighting.
And disposing of incandescent bulbs is not the same as disposing of the mercury filled mini-florescent bulbs. The fear in our city of 3 million is that the bulbs are just dumped into the trash, in a bin marked recycling, and they break, releasing the mercury. Traces have mercury have been noticed in waste dump runoffs. It is going to be in your water systems shortly, as the water makes its way towards the oceans. Anyone have ideas about evaporation of water laden with traces of mercury?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Banning one sort of technology in favor of another? Of course Edison would have LOVED it!
If we're going to be pedantic... You can't feed Alternating Current to an LED. By definition, the current won't flow the reverse way, so it's not AC. Alternating voltage, sure, but not AC.
The great-grandson's opinion, and that of Edison himself, is irrelevant. The government should not be outlawing the incandescent light bulbs. They are especially useful in many situations. It would be far better for the government to stop subsidizing the costs of energy such that the price of electricity rises to its natural high and then let people make their own choices. If the new lights are really better then people will buy them. This is a classic case of government over regulation.
"The first incandescent lamp [developed by Woodward and Evans] was constructed at Morrison's brass foundry in Toronto, and was a very crude affair. It consisted of a water gauge glass with a piece of carbon, filed by hand and drilled at each end, for the electrodes, and hermetically sealed at both ends, having a petcock at one end with a brass tube to exhaust the air. Woodward made the mistake of filling the tube or globe of this lamp with nitrogen after having exhausted the air. Prof. Elihu Thomson is quoted as having said that had he stopped when he had the tube exhausted he would have had the honor of being the inventor of the incandescent light as used for commercial purposes... the principle of the incandescent lamp dates several decades before the Woodward experiments, and that King, Chanzy, Farmer and others in the twenty years preceding 1860 made and used incandescent lamps much superior to the very imperfect one upon which Woodward's claims are based. Moreover, the Edison claims, as sustained in the courts, were not on the discovery of the principles of the incandescent lamp but on a definite combination of parts—all well known—which resulted in the production of a practical form of the incandescent lamp."[1] (From Wikipedia)
*** Don't be dull.***
I'm not drumk but I love incandescent bulbs too. I've tried many CFLs and none of them give warm light, none of them give full brightness immediately at power-on, none of them are mercury free, none of them handle cold temps well.
Sure. But you're only considering one side of the pros and cons list. On the other side you've got the facts that they consume less energy and they last longer.
We waste electricity in so many other ways
Is not an argument for continuing to waste energy with lightbulbs, but an argument to find lots more ways of not wasting energy as well as not using inefficient lightbulbs.
Anything that's "instant on" or uses a transformer ("wall wart") is a vampire sucking off energy and wasting it. Cell phone chargers or any kind of charger, cordless house phones, computers, video game consoles, TVs, VCRs, DVD/BR players, stereos, laptop chargers, monitors, printers, microwaves... these are only a sample of the vampires in your house.
That's uninformed. Someone told me the other day that I ought to unplug my laptop charger when not in use. So I looked it's spec up. When there's no MacBook attached, it uses 0.03W. In other words 1 hour of your 100 watt incandescent lightbulb being left on is equal to 3,333 hours (or 139 days) of my PSU being plugged in.
For sure that didn't used to be the case. PSUs are better than they used to be. The point is that it's not just lighting that's being made more efficient, but other things too. So there's even less excuse for not using more efficient lighting.
I thought his experiments to create an earthquake in a local town were conspiracy theory level stuff, but he really did do it.
He acquired a single metal I-beam girder from a scrap-yard, then attached a high-frequency EMF signal generator to it, and got the resonance frequency matched. This made the I-beam girder stretch, flex and contract like a tuning fork. Next thing, is that he goes to the construction site where the girder was found and tries to see what happens when he puts the EMF generator on a foundation girder in the basement. The whole structure starts to oscillate, and conveys those oscillations into the ground-rock. The whole town starts to experience this effect. Just as the cops come round to investigate, Tesla flees the scene.
They contain mercury vapor, but it doesn't leave the glass tube unless you break the tube.
At which point, even this small amount of mercury vapor is a (minor) health hazard. Certainly much more than a broken thermometer, which the mercury is liquid and if cleaned up promptly will hardly result in any (much more) hazardous vapor. Don't listen to me: pay attention to a state study that actually looked at mercury releases from a broken CFL in real-world conditions, something you never hear about....
http://www.maine.gov/dep/homeowner/cflreport.html
The amount of mercury in a CFL is far less than the amount of mercury put into the atmosphere by burning coal to power an incandescent bulb.
If you're unlucky enough to have your electricity sourced from coal power plants, this is probably true. However, even if you have electricity from coal plants, if you use CFLs in places where their lifespan is significantly reduced, like in fixtures where they get too hot or in places where they are turned on and off A LOT, this benefit is significantly reduced (and even negated) unless you recycle the bulb.
Moreover, most cities don't make it easy to recycle CFLs yet. Most people undoubtedly throw them into the trash, so the mercury does get out.
Yup, the "Tesla Oscillator" and tele-geodynamics. It should be clarified, it wasn't an electromagnetic field, it was a steam powered oscillator. He did demonstrate that harmonic oscillations could be felt throughout a building, with a very small input force. He was looking at sending waves (and therefor power) around the world, much like his work in harmonic oscillations in the atmosphere, which was people dubbed his death ray. For the world wide scale, the waves were spaced something like 1.75 hrs apart. Extremely ELF. :)
The story you're trying to tell is of a building on Wall Street, that was under construction. And obviously the "local town" was New York City. It's questionable if that really happened or not, as New York actually does sit on a fault line, the "125th Street fault line". The story was probably a total fabrication, based on the 1884 which was a magnitude 5.2 earthquake. It's much harder to attribute the two 2001 magnitude 2 earthquakes to him. From what I've read of Tesla, it would be very reasonable to believe that he claimed to have caused that, simply to draw attention to his work. He was a brilliant scientist, but not so good at business or public relations. If he were alive today, he'd be locked up in a mental hospital, and we would never see any of his work.
Even if you did manage to find a news article from the time that had that specific citation, I would be skeptical about the truth. Fact checking was limited, while sensationalized stories sold papers.
Tesla did fabulous work on ideas that had never been explored. There are plenty of strange and natural occurrences, which have been attributed to him, because his work did have strange results. I believe it was from his Colorado Springs lab that he induced sparks from people's feet and from water taps.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
NO, the newer bulbs COST MORE and they also have a chicken/egg problem in that they need to be popular before they can be cheap enough to be popular... It is an infinite loop that needed to be stopped and the market's behavior perpetuated it with no reason to break out of it. Doing the right thing has NOTHING to do with it-- that requires consumers to be educated and responsible in huge numbers.
WALMART:
Americans say they want jobs; they'd like to buy American so they can keep their jobs, yet they bought Chinese and put themselves out of work by buying cheap Chinese products that until recent years were clearly inferior.
The American public can't even save its own economy and you think they are capable of buying wisely?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Anything that's "instant on" or uses a transformer ("wall wart") is a vampire sucking off energy and wasting it. Cell phone chargers or any kind of charger, cordless house phones, computers, video game consoles, TVs, VCRs, DVD/BR players, stereos, laptop chargers, monitors, printers, microwaves... these are only a sample of the vampires in your house.
You mean electronics that are instant-on... and their efficiency varies dramatically. Plenty of non-electronic devices (and even simple electronic ones) are instant-on with zero power consumption in the interim. Incandescent bulbs, for example. (Also LED bulbs and many small electric motors, like a hand drill or vacuum cleaner.)
A lot of the things you list now use trivial amounts of power when "off" (at least, the good ones do). Chargers in particular can cut out when they're not charging. Such things are easy to measure.
To be fair, they emit ionizing or near-ionizing radiation internally (ultraviolet). That's the part that makes them fluorescent -- the internal coating that absorbs UV radiation and reradiates it at a lower (visible) frequency. I think in the end the UV radiation from a CFL is lower than that from an incandescent.
Mercury has a pretty low vapor pressure. Once broken, the mercury vapor will recondense into liquid mercury.
Mercury vapor is more hazardous than liquid mercury, primarily because it enters through the lungs instead of through ingestion or skin contact. However, elemental mercury (both vapor and liquid) is fairly safe, particularly in the quantities we're talking about, because it absorbs so poorly into the bloodstream. Most legitimate mercury hazards are mercury salts or, particularly bad, organic mercury compounds, which absorb into the bloodstream more readily.
Most electricity in the US is produced from coal. You don't have any control over the source of your electric power. In some states you can choose your electricity retailer, and select a plan that is "100% renewable", but that doesn't actually control the source of your power. Once it's in the grid, it's all electricity and you have zero control over the source.
Your claims about mercury content are seriously flawed. Do some research and stop spouting disproven lies.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
However, UV light.
Most ultraviolet [including UVA, UVB, and UVC] is classified as non-ionizing radiation. The higher energies of the ultraviolet spectrum from about 150 nm ('vacuum' ultraviolet) are ionizing, but this type of ultraviolet is not very penetrating and is blocked by air.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Its not fair to call him a great scientist and inventor. He's not. he's a businessman who used every shrewd underhanded technique to chase his competition out of business, and stifled all technology he couldn't squeeze for money.
When the Lumière brothers of France invented a movie you could play on the wall, he chased them out of jersey cause he thought it'd ruin his nickelodeon business, and didn't even bother trying to play technological catch up, because he though a movie on a screen couldn't be enticed to get people to pay for it. He was really the steve jobs of his day. Instead of law suits, he used thugs to beat people up and trash their labs
Oh, and Telsa used to work for edison. He was fired because Edison was scared that'd Telsa would take over because he Telsa was the better man. Oh, and Edison had said thugs from earlier burn Tesla's lab to the ground. Nearly cost him everything.
And that still puts far less mercury into the environment than the coal burned to create the energy to power a comparable incandescent bulb. As for relying upon coal, see my other post.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Who cares about that rogue Edison. Joseph Swan was the inventor of the light bulb and what he thought about it would be more interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan
No, because it is impossible to prove. I call it the post-mortem fallacy: where someone argues a position is held by another who was dead long before he or she could have had any opinion on the topic. We don't know what opinion Edison would have had on the new law.
Sounds like a special case of the "hypothesis contrary to fact" fallacy.
I don't dispute his claim that Edison was 'green' but this comment was beyond stupid:
How can inventor-entrepreneurs like Edison make a profit if every time they try to make a technological advance some nut in Congress pulls the rug out from under the them and their breakthroughs?
Basically, what he's saying is that inventor-entrepreneurs can ONLY succeed if someone bans their competitors. WTF? If you have the better mousetrap and assuming no one gets government help of any sort, you'll win. If you aren't winning, then go back to the lab and make it even better.
This is something Thomas Edison understood well but his Professor-of-English great-grandson obviously doesn't get. Hey, Prof, leave economic theory to people who understand it and stick to poetry or whatever it is you do.
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
CFL also has an issue in ceiling fans. The vibration causes the transformers to die prematurely. I asked the guy in the lighting section about it, and he suggested compact halogen, not sure how much power they save over incandescent though.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?