Light of My Life
A child born in the United States today will learn to read by the light of a compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) or a halogen bulb, or by the spectral dazzle of a light-emitting diode (LED) or some as-yet-uncommercialized technology that can put photons on the the target.target. But the incandescent light bulb, the familiar glass ball with the glowing tungsten spirochete inside, the light of our fathers, is going the way of the whale oil lamp.
The energy bill signed into law in December will phase out most types of incandescent bulbs by the middle of the next decade. The trouble with incandescent bulbs is that they are inefficient: About 90% of the electricity they consume is converted to heat. Unless you’re talking about an Easy-Bake Oven, a terrarium or a poultry incubator, that energy is wasted.
The end of incandescent lighting is of a piece with the larger demise of the analog signal. Audio recording and reproduction, radio and television--all skeins of electromagnetism--have been or soon will be replaced with more efficient digital signal processing (analog TV broadcasts end Feb. 17, 2009). An old-fashioned light bulb works by applying blunt-force electrical trauma to the filament, making it burn until it fails with a startling pop. An LED artfully manipulates quantum physics to turn milli-amps into lumens. The demise of the light bulb marks the final transition from electrics to electronics.
As a good liberal, I’m ready to embrace, and pay for, more efficient lighting. And yet, I’m already feeling what might be called Edison nostalgia. Even a bare bulb hanging from a wire is a thousand times more bewitching, more jocund and welcoming than a CFL screwed into the most arty fixture featured in Wallpaper magazine. The light from a CFL--stark and shadowless and overcorrecting--is a scold: Why haven’t you dusted? Why haven’t you taken better care of your skin? (This is the well-known public lighting effect.) LEDs, by their very nature, produce a single frequency of light, a sliver of the visible spectrum. In the case of “white” LEDs that would replace the common bulb, they are actually a ghastly white shade of blue, and that’s why everyone looks a touch cyanotic under them. The quality of light from these instruments will get better, but they only can approximate--only counterfeit--the warm, wide-spectrum glory of a filament that radiates across the visible spectrum and beyond.
Apparently, I’m not the only one feeling the loss. The energy bill’s light bulb provision kicked off a small riot in the blogosphere. “I don’t care if the compact bulbs save energy or not or if they are better for the environment,” roared Steadfastconservative on the Free Republic website. “Just how many more freedoms are we going to have to sacrifice for the sake of the environment?”
Setting aside the freedom equals light bulbs argument, there is more at stake here, something deeper than flattering lighting or the love of the time-honored and familiar.
To appreciate the phenomenology of the bare bulb, you need only turn one on. I have one hanging overhead in my garage. I pull the chain, and as I do I’m whisked to the center of a musty solar system, with boxes and tools surrounding me partly in light and partly in shadow, as if in various moon phases. There’s something satisfying and symmetrical about the centered brilliance of a light bulb, an echo of Creation. After all, the Bible does not say, Let there be indirect light!
Indeed, a light bulb embodies the cosmological view of a deist: All light and illumination near the source, the godhead, and increasing darkness and bafflement farther away. The suffused nimbus in the center of my darkened garage is the same radiance depicted in old religious paintings of an annunciation or the rising Christ.
While I’m considering a light bulb’s religious implications, my face seems to warm. Perhaps the light bulb’s inefficiency is the source of its luminous charisma. For as long as humans have had artificial illumination, light and heat have been joined: the torch, the candle, the gas lamp. Perhaps the meager warmth of the light bulb is modernity’s campfire.
The passing of any technology provokes nostalgia. I’m sure someone bemoaned the rise of the push-button phone and eulogized the rotary dialer (What a beautiful sound, the “shickity-shick” of a well-spun number. . . .) But the Edisonian light bulb is a more fundamental thing--so much the proverbial better idea that it came to symbolize the eureka moment, the flash of insight, when it appeared over a cartoon character’s head. The fact is, how we light the world inevitably affects how we see the world. I predict we’re going to miss the soft, forgiving light of the incandescent bulb with its celestial geometry. I predict a more harshly lighted future.
Times staff writer Dan Neil can be reached at dan.neil@latimes.com.