From IEEE Spectrum:
The Phoebus cartel engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb and gave birth to planned obsolescence
On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. As revelers hung Christmas lights elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach.
The cartel’s grip on the lightbulb market lasted only into the 1930s. Its far more enduring legacy was to engineer a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. By early 1925, this became codified at 1,000 hours for a pear-shaped household bulb, a marked reduction from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had previously been common. Cartel members rationalized this approach as a trade-off: Their lightbulbs were of a higher quality, more efficient, and brighter burning than other bulbs. They also cost a lot more. Indeed, all evidence points to the cartel’s being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for the consumer. In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence.
Today, with many countries phasing out incandescent lighting in favor of more-efficient and pricier LEDs, it’s worth revisiting this history—not simply as a quirky anecdote from the annals of technology but as a cautionary tale about the strange and unexpected pitfalls that can arise when a new technology vanquishes an old one.
It wasn’t easy being a lightbulb maker in the early 20th century. The rapid spread of electrification and the introduction of new forms of lighting like bicycle lamps, car headlights, and streetlights did offer nearly limitless opportunities for inventors and entrepreneurs. But as thousands of manufacturers vied for market share and a technological edge, no single company felt assured of stable sales from one year to the next. That was as true for tiny backroom operations as it was for the giant corporate entities with multinational factories and research laboratories. Immediately preceding the cartel’s formation, for instance, Osram experienced a dizzying drop in its German sales, from 63 million lightbulbs in the financial year 1922–23 to 28 million the following year. Not surprisingly, Osram head William Meinhardt was the first to propose the arrangement that eventually became the Phoebus cartel.Alliances among lightbulb makers were not exactly new. The Verkaufsstelle Vereinigter Glühlampenfabriken, for instance, was a European cartel of carbon-filament lamp manufacturers that formed in 1903 to stabilize industry ties. It was rendered superfluous when in 1906 two European companies introduced a superior lightbulb whose filament was made from tungsten paste....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also 2014's "Industry, Not Environmentalists, Killed Traditional Light Bulbs" on the U.S. light bulb law, the Energy Independence and Security Act, which led to a bit of an uproar, some hoarding and quite a few posts on Climateer Investing e.g.,
December 2011
For Sale Cheap--1MM 100-watts: "Congress overturns incandescent light bulb ban"
That'll teach me.
When the little voice in my head said "Go long 100-watts, they're the most popular" I should have remembered the Great Pork Fiasco of aught-eight when the Chinese threw open the doors to their Strategic Pork Reserve and I ended up eating BLT's for a year.
But no, instead the little voice says "If you buy 'em by the freight car load you'll make even more when the phase-out hits".
Fuckin' little voice.
Congressional negotiators struck a deal Thursday that overturns the new rules that were to have banned sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs beginning next year.
That agreement is tucked inside the massive 1,200-page spending bill that funds the government through the rest of this fiscal year, and which both houses of Congress will vote on Friday. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill, which heads off a looming government shutdown....
