The first product built to fail was the light bulb

For a hundred years, light bulbs have been engineered to die on a schedule. Today we take it for granted that our phones, appliances, and gadgets wear out too soon. But the light bulb got there first. It was the original product designed to fail, and the companies that made it wrote the playbook everyone else copied.

That practice has a name: planned obsolescence. It is the deliberate design of a product with a short life, so you have to buy it again and again.

How the bulb was rigged

When incandescent bulbs went into mass production in the 1920s, makers had already pushed bulb life past 2,500 hours. Longer-lasting bulbs, it turned out, were bad for business.

So in 1924, the largest lighting companies, including General Electric, Osram, and Philips, formed what became known as the Phoebus cartel. They agreed to cap the life of a light bulb at around 1,000 hours and fined any member whose bulbs lasted longer. Bulbs were re-engineered with weaker filaments and cheaper parts to hit that number.

A U.S. court later ruled that GE had violated antitrust law, finding that profit, not physics, was the reason a bulb was built to last only so long.

Proof that it was a choice, not a limit: a single Shelby Electric bulb has been burning in a Livermore, California firehouse since 1901. America could build a bulb that lasts a lifetime. It decided not to.

The same idea, spread everywhere

Once it worked for bulbs, planned obsolescence spread. Phones that slow down. Appliances built to fail just after the warranty. Cheap goods made to be replaced, not repaired. The result is a throw-away economy: landfills full of things that should still work, finite resources mined to make their replacements, and a steady erosion of trust in the brands that sell them.

Cheap LEDs are the newest version of the same trick, given undersized heat sinks and bargain drivers so they quit years early.

How to escape it

You have more power here than it feels like. Planned obsolescence only works if we keep buying it.

• Buy quality, once. A well-built LED rated for 25,000 hours costs a little more and outlasts a dozen cheap ones.
• Buy from people who tell you the truth. Look for real specs, honest lifespans, and a warranty that means something.
• Buy built to last, and built here. Durable, repairable, American-made products keep money, jobs, and quality at home.

That is the whole reason GoodBulb exists. Our everyday A19 is engineered to last 25,000 hours and made in America, on the only factory of its kind in the country. No planned failure. No hidden short life. A bulb that keeps its promise is the simplest way to opt out of a hundred-year-old racket.

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