In a fire station in Livermore, California, a small light bulb has been burning — with brief interruptions — since 1901. The Centennial Light has its own webcam and has outlived several of the cameras pointed at it. It matters because it’s evidence: long-lived bulbs were never impossible. At one point, they were simply against the rules.
Geneva, 1924
In December 1924, representatives of the world’s dominant lighting manufacturers — Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, Hungary’s Tungsram, and General Electric through its overseas arm — met in Geneva and formed what became known as the Phoebus cartel. Publicly, it was a standards body, harmonising fittings and quality. Privately, its file cards record something else: a coordinated programme to cap bulb lifespan at 1,000 hours, down from the 1,500–2,500 hours commonly achieved before.
This wasn’t left to good intentions. Member factories shipped sample bulbs to a central laboratory in Switzerland for life-testing, and firms whose products lasted too long faced fines. Engineers who had spent careers extending filament life were redirected to shorten it — reliably, precisely, to specification. Bulb lifespans across the industry duly converged on the target, and replacement sales did what the cartel intended.
The defence, and why it doesn’t rescue them
There is a real engineering trade-off buried in the story: a hotter filament burns brighter and more efficiently but dies sooner, so a 1,000-hour bulb is genuinely more efficient than a 2,500-hour one. Had the cartel merely standardised that trade-off openly, history might remember a technical committee. But the secrecy, the fines and the simultaneous price coordination point the other way — as does the fact that the arrangement was designed, in its own documents, to manage sales volumes. The cartel weakened through the 1930s amid competition from outsiders and collapsed with the Second World War, but the 1,000-hour incandescent remained the norm for the rest of the century.
Phoebus’s long shadow
Phoebus became the founding legend of planned obsolescence — cited in every debate about batteries that can’t be replaced, appliances that resist repair, and software that slows old devices. The lesson isn’t that every short-lived product is a conspiracy; most are ordinary cost-cutting. The lesson is that it happened, once, provably, with paperwork — which is why “right to repair” campaigners keep the story alive, and why a bulb in a California fire station is quietly one of the most subversive objects in America.
