As the new year was ushered in amid many dazzling light displays, the life of America\u2019s oldest light bulb was effectively extinguished\u2014with production now banned in the country due to modern technological upgrades that will save energy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The incandescent light bulb, patented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1880, and still widely-used in American homes, was banned January 1, 2014, after the Environmental Protection Agency determined that only ten percent of energy used by traditional incandescent bulbs went toward making light.\u00a0 The remaining ninety percent of energy was wasted, and ended up as heat, according to the EPA.<\/p>\n
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75-watt and 100-watt light bulbs were banned in 2013, but the beginning of 2014 signaled an end to America\u2019s most popular incandescent selections\u2014the coveted 40-watt and 60-watt bulbs, which will no longer be produced.\u00a0 Incandescents will now be replaced by halogen and LED bulbs, which are dramatically-more energy-conserving.<\/p>\n
The first recorded instance of incandescent light occurred in 1800, when English scientist Humphry Davy invented an electric battery, to which he connected a piece of carbon, which created light.\u00a0 60 years later, English physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, improved upon Davy\u2019s design, and added a carbon paper filament to the mix, which created great light, but burnt up rather quickly.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until 20 years after that when inventor Thomas Alva Edison experimented with thousands of different filaments, finally finding one that would create light in a bulb for up to 40 hours.\u00a0 He then \u201cone-upped\u201d himself, and later developed a bulb that would burn for over 1,500 hours.\u00a0 Although the first incandescent light was created in 1800, Edison did not develop and patent a usable model until 1880.<\/p>\n
Incandescent bulbs create light by heating a filament of tungsten metal until it is white-hot.\u00a0 The tungsten then slowly begins to vaporize and deposit on the inside of the light bulb\u2014making the bulb burn out because the tungsten becomes too thin to carry an electrical current.\u00a0 Halogen bulbs are filled with a special gas that causes the vaporized tungsten to re-circulate and deposit back onto the filament instead of the inside of the bulb, which in turn makes them burn longer and hotter.\u00a0 A new type of halogen bulb uses infrared light to redirect the tungsten back to the filament, and averages around 30 percent more efficiency that standard incandescent bulbs.<\/p>\n
CFLs\u2014or compact fluorescent lamps, have been found to be more than 75 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs.\u00a0 Many scientists have called for CFLs to be implemented as the standard light bulb in American homes and businesses, with Arthur Rodenfeld, physicist and member of California\u2019s Energy Commission saying that if every home across America would replace just one incandescent bulb with a CFL, the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions saved would be equal to taking one million cars off of the road.<\/p>\n
Daycoa, Incorporated of Medway is a second-generation, family-owned distributor of commercial lighting products, one of the largest in the nation.\u00a0 Norm Dendler of Daycoa said that the company still has access to thousands of incandescent bulbs ranging from 25, 40, 60, and 75-wattages.\u00a0 Dendler said the company that supplies Daycoa with bulbs is based out of South Carolina, but did not anticipate Daycoa to run out of incandescent bulbs in the immediate future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the new year was ushered in amid many dazzling light displays, the life of America\u2019s oldest light bulb was effectively extinguished\u2014with production now banned in the country due to modern technological upgrades that will save energy.\u00a0 The incandescent light bulb, patented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1880, and still widely-used in American homes, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enoneagle.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}