A lightbulb has been burning in a firehouse since 1901
The same year manufacturers cut bulb lifespans by more than half to sell more bulbs, one handmade bulb in California just kept refusing to die.
The Centennial Light in Livermore, California, was switched on in 1901 and has been burning, with only a handful of brief interruptions, for well over a century. It hangs today at a fire station, watched over by a livestream, a minor tourist attraction built entirely on the fact that it has not burned out.
It is also, quietly, an inconvenient fact for the light bulb industry. In 1924, engineers and executives from Osram, Philips, General Electric, and other major manufacturers met in Geneva and formed the Phoebus cartel, an agreement to divide up world markets — and to standardize bulb life at 1,000 hours, down from the roughly 2,500 hours some bulbs had been achieving. Members who made bulbs that lasted too long were fined.
The cartel wasn't purely cynical bookkeeping. Shorter-lived filaments really can burn brighter for the same electricity, and some engineers have argued the 1,000-hour standard was a legitimate trade-off between brightness and longevity, not just a scheme. Phoebus collapsed in 1939 as war made international coordination impossible. Bulbs kept selling at roughly that same lifespan for decades afterward anyway.
The Centennial Light doesn't prove the conspiracy story is simple. It proves something narrower and stranger: durability was always available as an engineering choice. Somebody, at some point, in some room, chose against it — and the choice outlived the cartel that made it.