Name: This is why we can't have nice things
Uploaded: 2021-04-01T23:37:30.000Z
Duration: 17 min 30 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

- This is a video about things like cars,

phones, and light bulbs and an actual conspiracy

I am outside Livermore Fire Station, number six.

- It's not even connected to a light switch

but it does have a backup battery and generator.

after commercial light bulbs were first invented,

And yet, it has been running for over a million hours,

way longer than any light bulb today is meant to last.

Awhile back, a friend of mine told me this story,

I mean, you would never have any repeat customers

If you could make an everlasting light bulb,

And so you could charge really high prices,

make a lot of money, even if demand would eventually dry up.

I just couldn't imagine that we had better light bulbs

in the past and then intentionally made them worse,

Inventing a viable electric light was hard,

I mean, this is the typical incandescent design,

which just involves passing electric current

through a material making it so hot that it glows,

less than 5% of the electrical energy comes out as light.

which give off a little bit of light as a by-product.

The temperature of the filament can get up to 2,800 Kelvin.

That is half as hot as the surface of the sun.

At temperatures like those, most materials melt.

- That's so cool. - And if they don't melt,

which is why in the 1840s, Warren De la Rue came

up with the idea of putting the filament in a vacuum bulb,

with a cotton thread filament that lasted 14 hours.

Other inventors created bulbs with platinum filaments

And gradually, the lifespan of bulbs increased.

The filaments changed from carbon to tungsten,

And by the early 1920s, average bulb lifetimes

were approaching 2,000 hours with some lasting 2,500 hours.

But this is when lifetimes stopped getting longer

In Geneva, Switzerland just before Christmas, 1924,

there was a secret meeting of top executives

from the world's leading light bulb companies,

Phillips, International General Electric,

and the UK's Associated Electric among others.

as the Phoebus Cartel named after Phoebus,

by controlling the world supply of light bulbs.

In the early days of the electrical industry,

but by now they had largely been consolidated

each dominant in a particular part of the world.

For example, in 1923, OSRAM sold 63 million light bulbs,

but the following year they sold only 28 million.

Light bulbs were lasting too long, eating into sales.

So all the companies in the cartel agreed

to 1,000 hours cutting the existing average almost in half.

that the other companies would actually follow the rules

After all, it would be in each of their individual interests

to make a better product to outsell the others?

each of the manufacturers have to send in sample bulbs

from their factories and they were tested on big test stands

字幕リスト動画再生

This is why we can't have nice things

eventually

depression

basically

average