99% Invisible - 144- There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Episode Date: December 10, 2014

Hanging in the garage of Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California, there’s a small, pear-shaped light bulb. It is glowing right now. This lightbulb has been glowing, with just a couple of momentary interruptions, for 113 years. You can see … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. About an hour east of Oakland in the town of Livermore, California, hanging in the garage of Fire Station number six. There's a small, pear-shaped light bulb. The light bulb is on. Right now, it's glowing,

and it's been glowing. It's just a couple of momentary interruptions for 113 years. Oh, there it is. We're looking at the longest burning, longest continuously burning light bulb in the world, and the Guinness Book of World Records, and it was installed in 1901. We send our producer Katie Mingle out there to see the bulb, which is a genuine heirloom from the dawn of electric illumination, built by one of its pioneers, a guy named Adolf

Shalai. of electric illumination built by one of its pioneers, a guy named Adolf Schale. Probably when you think about the beginning of electric light, you go immediately to Thomas Edison. That's John Moellum, he's a writer from San Francisco. He wrote a piece about the Livermore Lightbowl for pop-up magazine earlier this year. But the age of electric light didn't just switch on all at once. You had tinkers trying to come up with better designs, trying to iterate and innovate, something that would burn longer or maybe brighter or that would cost less. So Shale was one of these guys. It was a great time of invention and innovation.

All over America, light bulbs were going off over people's heads and some of those light bulbs were being turned into actual light bulbs. Shale liked to do this whole theatrical product demo where he'd take a big light bulb back, the kind you'd see on a theater marquee. In it would be one bulb of his own design and the rest would be bulbs from competing brands. Then Shalai would start slowly dialing up the power and one by one the competitors bulb all explode. Shalai's would be the last one shiny.

One of those tenacious light bulbs made it all the way to Livermore, California. Its origin was in 1901 when a shop owner donated it to the town's volunteer fire department. They were called the fire boys in those days. And with the bulb hanging in their firehouse, this meant they could now gather up all their equipment if a call about a fire came in in the middle of the night in the dark. In those dark ages there were no fire engines. Firefighters used hose carts pulled by horses. Here's Tom Bramble, former deputy fire chief in Livermore. This tape of him is from a documentary about the ball called Century of Light. The volunteers that would that arrived to an incident they

would come to the station there and get their their hose cart, hitch up the horses, look for all of the equipment that they were looking for, but this light lit up the hose cart room so that it could without getting injured, falling over. So the light bulbs served a very significant function. In 1906, the fire station moved just down the street. The light bulb had been on at that point for five years. They had no idea how long it would last, but it was their only light bulb.

So of course, they brought it along. It seems like people just stopped thinking about the bulb after a while. There wasn't really an obvious way to shut it off, the way that it had been wired, but it must have just been dim and unobtrusive enough that no one really tried too hard. Eventually the old-fashioned hose carts were replaced with fire trucks. The bulb hung between the firehouses two garage doors and the firefighters were like aware of it, but they didn't think much about it. The bulb hung down, probably, well, hung down a pretty good distance from the ceiling and on a long cord that it actually sits on today, the same cord, but it was pretty it was low enough that you could walk by and actually reach up and tap the bulb and

or just swing back and forth. As time went on we even would throw nerf balls at it. In 1971 the first full-time chief of the Livermore Fire Department, a guy named Jack Barard, got curious about the light bulb. And he asked a local newspaper reporter to look into the bulb's history. The resulting article got the residents of Livermore talking about the bulb, and it became a point to pride. Livermore's own little antiquity. The firefighters stopped throwing nerf balls at it.

Five years later, when the fire department was moving into a new building, they obviously knew that they couldn't leave the bulb behind and in fact Chief Beard insisted that they take it with them. On March 31, 1976, it was the day that we moved the light bulb from 2365 First Street out here on East Avenue to this station. That's Lynn Owens. He was the former division chief of the Livermore Fire Department. This interview was recorded for the Century of Light documentary released in 2011.

March 31st of 76 will always be a special day to me. The light bulb was escorted with red lights in a siren. We had a special box built. Not only that, but the box was painted red, which even made it more special. When they got the light bulb to the new station, the electrician set it up so that the light bulb could be screwed in immediately.

He climbed up the ladder with the light bulb, screwed the wires together so that everything would go on. And Frank, and made the connection, the light bulb didn't come on. And we gasped. Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. What did we do? This world-famous light bulb, and now it's gone.

But then the electrician jiggled somewhere around. The light came back on. Everybody made a big sigh of relief. on. Everybody made a big sigh of relief. Mimo, as the light bulb was becoming more and more famous, it was impossible for people not to start wondering about what it was made of and how it could still possibly be working. The obvious way to solve the mystery would be to crack the light bulb open and examine it, but obviously no one wanted to do that. It was just too precious. Hi, I'm Deborah Katz. I'm a physics professor at the US Naval Academy in inapolis, Maryland.

Dr. Katz did some tests on similar light bulbs. Light bulbs made by the same company in the same time period. She measured the thickness of the bulb's filament, which is that tiny piece of wire in the bulb that can break really easily. And I did that using a laser, so I didn't have to break the bulb to get in there. She figured out that the filament in the Livermore bulb was 8 times thicker than a regular bulb, and made from carbon instead of tungsten. What I figured out doesn't tell me why the filament shouldn't have broken by now. That's pretty incredible. I think it still is a mystery.

What she does know is that in 1924, a bunch of light bulb companies got together and formed a cartel called Phoebus. The goal of the cartel was for all the light bulb companies to stop making bulbs that lasted so long so that everyone could sell more light bulbs. Members of the cartel were actually charged fines if their bulbs burned for too many hours. And in two years, the companies light bulbs went from lasting 2,500 hours down to 1,500 hours. And by the 1940s, they actually made their goal of bulbs that only lasted 1,000 hours. The Shelby Company, which manufactured Chile's bulb, had already gone out of business by the

time the FEMA's cartel had been formed. But I'd like to think that they wouldn't have been involved with that nonsense. I think they were trying to make a quality product rather than a product with built-in obsolescence. And a quality product it was. This whole time, of course, the bulb was just hanging there and continuing to glow. So in a way, its story was taking on this air of magical realism. In 2001, a group of locals decided to live

or more ought to have a hundredth birthday party for the light bulb. They formed the Centennial Bulb Committee and started planning what they thought would be a small get together at the firehouse that June. In the end, 600 people showed up and they had cake and there were rock bands playing and kids dancing on the top of the fire truck.

Committee members gave live interviews to Katie Kurek and CNN. By then responsibility for the bulb had passed from chief bearer, he was the first fireman to become interested in the bulb, to one of the firefighters who served under him, Lynn Owens, you heard from him earlier. Owens had been one of the younger guys in the seventies

who'd sat around checking Nerf footballs at the light bulb. But by this point, by the time the bulb turned 100, he was already a retired division chief. He was the screening aging guy with these tiny glasses and a bristly white mustache. Owens loved the bulb. And he left to reclaim his love. That light bulb is dependable. That light bulb has been doing the job it was intended to do since 1901. It was like he was talking about the light bulb the way James Earl Jones talked about baseball at the end of field of dreams.

It reminds us all that once was good. It could be again. Actually, that's how a lot of people end up talking about the light bulb though. People write letters to the committee and they say things like the light bulb gives them hope, or they call it, quote, a reassuring reminder of faithfulness and service. In a letter, President George W. Bush called the light bulb, quote, an enduring symbol of the American spirit of invention, end quote. For a lot of people, it also ironically symbolizes another great American invention, planned obsolescence.

I like the light bulb because it's this little speck of continuity. You know, it's something that started more than a century ago, and it keeps going. So it sort of connects us to that time. You can almost imagine it like this little ember of a campfire that was lit back then, and is still glowing. And it kind of in the same way, if you trace that history, you see these waves of people coming together around that fire and then slowly leaving the picture and new ones coming in.

The Lightbulb outlived Jack Baird, the first fire chief who became curious about it, and Lynn Owens, its most devoted caretaker. Shalais Lightbulb has seen generations of firefighters come and go through Livermore. So in 2001, right around the time of the party, the Centennial Bulb Committee also set up a webcam in front of the light bulb. The camera takes a picture of the bulb every 30 seconds so that people all over the world can make sure that it's still on. The guy who maintains the camera is named Steve Bunn. And he told me he's already had to replace the supposedly high-tech webcam two times because the light bulb has outlasted both of those devices. The bulb has its own standby generator, something inaccurately named the

uninterruptible power supply. It's zonked out suddenly in the middle of the night in May of 2013. And when it did, the light bulb went dark. Steve told me that when it happened, people around the world who happened to be watching the webcam at that point saw the bulb link out and started calling or emailing him panicked or just in disbelief. The bulb was out for nine hours and 42 minutes before someone was finally able to get over to the firehouse and rake up an extension court. When it was turned back on, Steve said, everyone swore it looked brighter. She's into us To die by your side

It's such a heavenly way to die Under the tuntum shore Kill the foe of the bones To die by your side Well, the measure that infringes mine Oh, well, the legend never goes out 99% Invisible was produced this week by John Moellum and Katie Mangle with Sam Greenspan, Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Christopher Lepp, who allowed us to use audio from his film Sentry of Light.

You can find a link to the film on our website. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW in San Francisco, and produced out of the offices of Arkson, an architecture and interiors firm located in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Let's stay safe downtown Oakland, California. Let's stay safe out there, everyone. You can find 99% invisible and like us on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars, everyone's this killer Tumblr for us, but for links and pictures and lists of songs

and all the back episodes, go to 999pi.org. Radyo Tepi from PRX.