How many generations does it take to change a lightbulb?
The 140 year-old lightbulb that still works… and inspires.
A couple renovating a home in Illinois found this old lightbulb in the walls - and it still works!
It was bought at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and continues to conduct electricity a century later.
And there’s this appreciation for the Edison screw from last month:
I suppose the lightbulb is the kind of old technology that we don’t think about much. It’s too common and too important.
But it’s surprising to realize there’s a direct link from Edison himself to the everyday bulbs gleaming in our homes. I would have guessed that he had created some creaky old prototype that had been improved and perfected by legions of white lab coats over the decades. He got it so right that we’re still using the same design 140 years later. It turns out he was inspired by the top of a gas can - you can see the resemblance - and this design, with a one inch base and seven threads per inch, turned out to be a lasting hit.
Do we appreciate the benefits of old technology enough?
Because on one hand, it’s century-old technology. It’s dated, dusty, reliable. It’s patents and inventions from another era that are so common and so prevalent we don’t have to think about them. We’ve grown up with these old friends.
And on the other hand, we benefit from a century of technology invented especially for us. All of those patents and inventions started in someone’s kitchen, garage, or lab. And driving each of those inventions were the inventors - the women and men who spent long hours, weekends, years in those garages, doing clever things that worked - copying the top of a gas can to give you light - and thousands of things that didn’t.
A walk through your home this morning reveals hundreds of years worth of technological research done with your comfort in mind.
Do we appreciate it enough? Or do we mostly grumble about it when it’s not working? Like I’m doing right now with the slightly faulty light switch that doesn’t quite work in the bathroom. I know I’ve spent more time thinking about how that annoys me than I have appreciating the miracle of light.
It is a miracle.
The four houses where your grandparents were born didn’t have electricity, heat, refrigeration, lights, or insulation. They were basically camping indoors.
Preparing for my family reunion next year, I found a comment from my grandfather that when school finished in the spring, his parents would put away the fancy $1.75 shoes, and they’d go barefoot until school started again in the fall.
Today that would get the parents jail time. But just a few generations ago, we were really living lives much closer to the wild. They didn’t live swaddled in the electricity and convenience you’re used to.
In fact, if your grandparents set out to purchase all the technologies that you take for granted, they couldn’t have done it. To fund the research alone would have cost them millions of dollars. Your daily life, full of small wonders and miracles, is completely beyond the dreams of your parents’ parents’ parents.
You’re likely reading this on a smartphone. The device you have in your hands right now has more computing power (transistors) than all the computers in the entire world on the day you were born. It is infinitely more powerful than the computer that landed men on the moon. And any one of the default apps - Maps, Weather, Email, Wallet, Camera - would be the envy of every king and queen in world history. What they would be willing to pay in gold for just one of those apps!
If you measured your wealth today, not by what it cost you to purchase the technologies that make your life easy, but by what it would have cost the richest person in the world a hundred years ago, you’re a millionaire dozens of times over. Certainly far richer than grandma and grandpa ever had hope for you being.
So, yes, let’s keep making things better. Our little grumbles and wants and desires do help our society make progress. Wanting a better light switch, or iPhone, or safer cars helps our world get better every day.
But also, yes, let’s be thankful for what more than a hundred years of progress, from Thomas Alva Edison to Steve Jobs, have done for us.
Have a bright week, Readers!
When I think of Edison, I try to visualize his large team of engineers. So what did their resumes look like? The business leader ensures the patent ownership through 'I.P. for hire", the promotion, the market, but you can never be certain from whose mind the creative leap actually was sparked. The roles and contributions become blurred by the optics that descend through history. The hiring process yet today has no quantifiable means of discerning creative intelligence which is the root of true innovation. We are now knee deep in generations of excellent imitators and information echo'ers - the Googler Schmooglers. True creativity spawns from the deep, not so much from the mere abundance of shallow knowledge in conjunction with an advanced capability to imitate and repeat.
Great piece on Edison’s socket- I half expected a foray into the wonder of knob and tube wiring still working in some barns - Keep up the fascinating threads!