Slashdot Mirror
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 All you need to know to figure out his stance on old outdated technology versus new, superior technology is this: DC vs. AC, Edison vs. Tesla.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.
...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.
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."
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.
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.
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. :)
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He'd be more concerned about getting out of the damn box in the ground.
FRA: STFU GTFO
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.
Finally, solar panels and LEDs could show how to use DC networks.
The LED itself needs a heatsink as well. Like power transistors and CPUs, power LEDs produce loads of waste heat (less than incandecent or CFL but still a signifcant amount). Also LED life shortens significantly when heated above 50C or thereabouts, so the heatsinks need to be relatively large to dissipate enough heat at a small temperature difference.
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.
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.
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.
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.