When Thomas Edison was working on the incandescent lamp in 1879, he purportedly said, “We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop, Lord only knows.”
That heavenly glow stopped last week. White Outdoor String Lights
We knew the day was coming when the lights would go out, and by that, I mean the light of the incandescent light bulb. As of Aug. 1, the Biden administration’s regulations went into effect: All bulbs forthwith must comply with new efficiency standards. While not explicitly banning incandescent bulbs, these regulations will make it awfully hard — if not impossible — for the old Edison bulb to pass muster.
Intellectually, I’m on board. The more environmental regulations this country can impose, the better. My own microcontribution is an array of personal eco-diktats, some of which I try to force on other members of my family. I am forever turning out lights when people momentarily leave a room. I wash and reuse Ziploc bags until they no longer zip, and I enlist all stray bags into litter box duty. I am a manic recycler of paper.
There is simply no reasonable defense of incandescent light bulbs. LED bulbs last longer, are cheaper in the long run and, now that their once hefty price tag has dropped, in the short run as well. Their widespread use will significantly reduce carbon emissions.
But against reason, let me argue briefly and futilely in favor of the aesthetic, ambient, even tactile (I’ll explain) benefits of Edison’s radiant invention.
First, consider the alternatives. A hundred times I have been told that LED bulbs, with their unnatural froideur and their sour green aura, can now simulate all manner of glow. They come with labels like soft white and bright white, cool white and daylight. It’s all nonsense. The morose cast of the LED bulb looks one step up from the dread fluorescent, with its grim hue supplying the gray to barely finished basements, the line at the D.M.V. and the waiting room in the E.R. Stark. Devoid of passion. Institutional. I’m hardly the first person to notice that LED light simply looks bad.
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