Verne Equinox, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
The incandescent lightbulb, invented by many but made practical by Thomas Edison, changed the world.
Its time has passed. Once ubiquitous, it is now a niche product. LED lighting has replaced incandescent lighting in most applications, and for good reason. An incandescent lightbulb should really be called an incandescent heat bulb: only a fraction, often less than 5%, of the energy an incandescent bulb uses goes to produce visible light. The rest is wasted as heat. They’re so good at heating that you used to be able to buy working ovens that used incandescent light bulbs as their sole source of heat.
LED bulbs use a fraction of the energy of incandescents and last far, far longer. They’re more expensive to produce, true, but the overall cost of ownership is so much lower that the switch to LED lighting for most applications was a no-brainer. I light my entire house, somewhat lavishly, for less energy than it takes to power a single 100-watt incandescent dinosaur.
Incandescent bulbs still are used in a few niche areas:
- heat lamps
- applications where even full-spectrum light is required
- apologizing for AI
Wait… apologizing for AI? Yes, I have seen a spate of articles lately which compare the energy cost of making a query to an “artificial intelligence” chatbot to using a “standard lightbulb.” But their “standard lightbulb” or “regular lightbulb” or “100-watt lightbulb” or (among the more honest) “standard incandescent lightbulb” invariably turns out to be a “standard” lightbulb from 1880-1990, not the 20-times-more-efficient bulbs everyone is using these days.
What they seem to be saying with these comparisons is “modern LLMs are such energy hogs that they need to be compared to 19th-century inefficient technologies to appear even marginally efficient.”
—2p