Granville T. Woods - deserves a lot of credit
Sigh... If only Black people knew our own history! We wouldn't be so hung up on constant victimization.
Posted on 05/13/2007 4:38:15 AM PDT by Kaslin
Thomas Edison must be rolling over in his grave. Nikola Tesla is spinning in his. Yes, switch on the politics for the Battle the Bulb: The light bulb faces a government ban.
Edison worked up a sweat to find a filament that would “burn” long enough to make electric light economical for households everywhere. A few decades later one of his employees came up with an even better filament, tungsten. Civilization has been lighting its nights and darker corners with light bulbs ever since.
Genius may be x percent inspiration and y percent perspiration, but Edison’s x wasn’t the same as Tesla’s x. A few year’s after Edison’s first light bulb, Tesla introduced fluorescent lights, which sprouted from his head like Athena from the brow of Zeus, or hair from a follicle — that is, without much sweat. And by the 1920s this technology had developed well enough to become a major competitor to the incandescent bulb.
Fluorescents were much cheaper to brighten a room, and many businesses put them in warehouses and even show rooms, despite their slightly strange, deranged white light.
A few decades ago, Tesla’s lamps went through another design revolution: the compact fluorescent lamp, or CFL. The familiar tube of the standard fluorescent lamp was decreased in size, twisted into a convenient swirl, and attached to a control gear (to limit the current) in just such a way as to enable the CFL to be screwed into a light bulb socket. Voilà! Finally, a real challenge to the incandescent light bulb!
CFLs cost less to run, in most uses. A lot less. You can save more than $30 in electricity per the average life of one of these devices, in the time that you’d run a series of incandescent bulbs.
The trouble with cost-saving technology is often that you have to pay more up front. This means that the poorer you are, the less likely you are to save money over the long haul: the outlay costs deter you from long-term savings. (That’s a problem the poor have on all sorts of things. The long term might be said to be the chief problem of the poor. But that’s another story.)
But the situation is getting better. CFLs were expensive in their early days; they are not so costly now. Not long ago each commanded prices higher than a Compact Disc; now one can be had for as low as an iTunes download or two. So even the most hedonistic, present-moment, time-horizon-deficient lout can now be tempted to buy them.
My wife started buying them from Wal-Mart some time back. Wal-Mart prides itself on its CFL advocacy and cheap delivery of these cost-savings devices. Yet, for some reason, praise for the company tends to be muted.
Sadly, there’s a dark side to this bright story.
Yes, today we have an amazing amount of lighting choices: CFLs, incandescents, LEDs, halogen bulbs, an amazing assortment of options.
But politicians now want to limit those choices.
I guess we could say that politicians don’t like the fact that Wal-Mart can claim to have done some good for overall energy efficiency. They want to steal Wal-Mart’s thunder. They want to mandate CFLs by outlawing incandescents.
Let me pause for a moment here. I’ve been working in the political realm for decades now. And every time some politician or activist cooks up a new cause, a new regulation or tax, I wonder if anything could be more absurd than this.
Now I have to wonder again. This is a truly stupid idea.
Why stupid? Well, I’m pretty certain no sane person would want to run CFLs for every lighting use. I prefer normal incandescent bulbs for reading . . . and I prefer brighter halogen light bulbs even more. (Still, indirect sunlight is best.) And for night-lights, a specially designed LED works better than either incandescents or CFLs. That’s my opinion; you might choose differently.
That’s one of the great things about markets: we get to choose.
Until politicians start meddling.
Australian politicians have already pushed through pro-CFL, anti-Edisonian legislation, enforcing a massive technology switch. The European Union is heading that way pell-mell. And there are Dems and Reps in Congress talking about doing the same thing, here.
Why?
To save energy! To save the environment! They look at the big picture and imagine every incandescent replaced with a CFL, and they calculate just how much less coal would have to be burned, and . . . they become impatient.
That’s all it is, really. They are impatient with Americans’ learning curve. Americans are indeed switching forms of lighting, at least in many halls and rooms of their homes and offices, but a few politicians and environmentalists just can’t wait. They want to force more people to switch faster.
Funny thing is, there’s mercury in those CFLs. Mercury is what makes the light. And, when you break one of those bulbs, clean-up should be done carefully.
Worse yet, if you listen to those same people (politicians, environmental alarmists) about how dangerous even the smallest amount of mercury can be, you’d hire thousand-dollar clean-up crews every time you break a bulb.
So much for cheaper!
Of course, the amount of mercury in a CFL is smaller than in an old thermometer, which, if you’re my age, you probably deliberately broke apart to play with the quicksilver when you were a kid. And lived to tell the tale.
That’s common sense talking, though. Politicians and alarmists, on the other hand, tend to lurch in the other direction, and usually we’d expect them to outlaw CFLs, not mandate them. CFL tech is precisely the kind of tech that the Ralph Naders of this world tend to hate: the kind that corporations “push” on us “regardless” of the “harm” it “inflicts.”
Truth is, of course, this is a world of trade-offs. Nothing is completely safe. And even environmentalists find themselves backing one dangerous technology over another. Why? To save the planet. (See any parallels between years of opposition to nuclear power, and the rising tide of environmentalists who now support it?)
I don’t want the planet to go down any more than you do. But I think most sensible people can agree that outlawing incandescent bulbs is no way to save anything but the principle of totalitarian coercion. Let the market choose this one — that is, let people choose. Let them choose which costs to consider, which risks to worry about more.
And tell all who would forbid us Edison’s technology that we’d rather fight than . . . have them tell us how to switch. Paul Jacob is a Senior Advisor at The Sam Adams Alliance, a Townhall.com member group. His daily Common Sense commentary appears on the Web, via e-mail, and on radio stations across America.
LED will be the future and eventually organoluminescence like living light that many species use like fireflies and deep sea denizens. I can easily visualize organic light in the future that essentially lives off of small amounts of waste material and does not require an electrical source.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1678447/posts
Light Pollution (If you think it’s a joke, think again. The movement seeks to change laws)
When will society wake up and realize that these environmentalist “do-gooders” have caused more harm to our world than good?
When pigs sprout wings and fly
Someone please save us from idiot politicians.
Speaking of “cooking up a new cause”...Do u remember a few yrs back when you took in your barbecue grills propane tank for a refill...only to find out it was against the law to refill it...All you had to do was buy a couple of new “safe” ones at $30 bucks a pop and u were back in business...(I wonder who made a fortune off of that lil law change?...besides Hank Hill of course)....Lets see...$30 x how many existing propane tanks in the US???...Wonder what happened to all those old obsolete tanks???
I see that the NYT being 180 degrees out of phase with reality is nothing new. I wouldn’t mind seeing a compilation of such arrogance-flavored missteps from the mainstream media.
I don't know, but I'll hazard a guess. A cursory inspection, a quick paintjob and a new label- and they're 'reconditioned', and back in the market?
And outlawing incandescents is really, really, really STUPID!
Here is something similar:
A law passed several years ago mandated to size of toilet reservoirs. The purpose was to limit the amount of water used per flush. Many people have found it necessary to flush 2 or 3 times to accomplish the job. This may actually cause more water to be used. Some Americans have found that Canada does not have a similar regulation and import fixtures from Canada.
Someone please save us from idiot politicians.
The trouble with florescent lights is that they flicker at 60Hz and offer a harsh light, and are not generally receptive to dimmers. While this flicker is imperceptible to the conscious mind they are annoying over time. The incandescent bulb is smooth and does not flicker with the change in frequency.
Check your computer monitor. It should offer modes like 72 or 80 Hz so that the monitor does not flicker at the same frequency as the florescent lights. In my office which is lit with florescent lights I have a small regular lamp and have my monitor set to 80Hz to keep it from giving me a headache.
Nothing against the CFL per se, and they have many uses, but they also have limitations that should be understood.
Mandates are a bad idea. For the CFL uses that make sense people will use CFLs without coercion. For the uses that don't make sense, how does it make sense to demand something that doesn't make sense to use be used?
Granville T. Woods - deserves a lot of credit
Sigh... If only Black people knew our own history! We wouldn't be so hung up on constant victimization.
This only goes to show that the New York Times was screwed up even then...130 years ago!
The key word here is "Employee".
Who remembers the name of the female lab tech who discovered polyaramids(Kevlar) for example?
From my experiences in Corporations, it's a miracle Woods is remembered at all, because everyone knows "only VP's have ideas".
In a similar way, Edison's hundreds of patents would never have happened were it not for the star-struck "Little" employees, who did the inventing on the other things than the light bulb and the phonograph.
that’s exactly correct..if the tank is over 12 years old it’s agin the law to refill it UNLESS it’s been inspected and approved for use for another 12 years or so..there would be a sticker on the top of the tank somewhere..
I think it’s foolish to replace incandescents during the winter time. One of the main complaints is they waste their energy by giving off heat. So? That’s exactly what I want during the winter months.
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