For more than a century, light bulbs came in one basic form and we all knew which ones to buy and how to screw them into their sockets. Changing light bulbs, in fact, was one of the few do-it-myself projects I could attempt at our house without my wife insisting that I was going to cause a fire, a flood or other major structural damage.
But then someone in some federal agency or other decided that our incandescent light bulbs were using too much energy and we all should all run out and buy CFL bulbs, which would save us money in the long run and also be more environmentally friendly.
So I ran out and bought a bunch of them. But when I got them home I discovered that a lot of them didn’t work in our lamps, because they were too tall to fit beneath the metal thing, called a harp, that supports the lamp shade. And they were shaped like corkscrews, so you couldn’t attach lamp shades directly to them the way you could with bulbs that were bulb shaped.
So we had to go out and buy a bunch of new lamps, which pretty much took care of the money we were saving on energy. And then we read stories about how the curly bulbs were full of mercury, so if you broke one you should immediately evacuate the house and call a hazmat squad. Which pretty much took care of the environmentally friendly thing.
The next light bulb improvement was called an LCD which, cost anywhere from $10 to $20, but had an average life of 22 years, during which time you would save $165 in energy costs. Which, as nearly as I can calculate, would free up enough money to buy an extra cup of coffee a once a year at Starbucks. The good news, though, is that LCDs don’t contain a lot of mercury. Only lead and arsenic.
One of the new bulbs being developed is called Finally and works with a tiny antenna wrapped in copper wire. The other is called VUL and has something to do with electrons and phosphors. I’m not sure what else those new bulbs might contain.
But I’m guessing Strontium 90.
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