Light bulb manufacturers are struggling. The year is 1924, and their sales are way down. Consumers just aren’t buying them any more. Why? Because of one major flaw: longevity. The problem with making a durable, long-lasting product is that, if it’s actually durable, people don’t need more- not for a while, at least. So these companies come up with a plan.
Now it’s December of 1924- the 23rd of December, actually, and international representatives from some of the largest lightbulb companies in the world are sitting around in Geneva. They’re discussing, plotting, compromising, and trying to find a way to increase sales again. Of course, it’s all about the money. So, they talk about a few different legal things of varying importance, agreements and what not, but it boils down to this: every company present would agree to only sell lightbulbs that lasted 1,000 hours. If they sold bulbs that lasted longer, they would be fined. Based on the Greek god of the sun, they settled on a name: The Phoebus Cartel.
This 1,000 hour agreement wasn’t just a limitation of growth- most light bulbs had already evolved hundreds of hours more over 1k. Instead of halting new designs, companies devoted even more resources and engineers to figuring out how to make their products worse. Rooms were built to store thousands of light bulbs, to run them dry and document how short they lived, to better understand how to drive that time farther into the ground. And they succeeded!! Sales increased, money grew, the lightbulb business was thriving at the expense of our wallets.
The Cartel disbanded in 1939 as World War 2 made it impossible for the corporations to communicate. But they left a potent legacy in the form of ‘planned obsolescence-’ when companies take a leaf from Phoebus’s book and purposely design products to have shorter longevity. So the next time you need to replace your barely two-year-old phone, remember the one cold December, almost 100 years ago, when the strongest light merchants on Earth agreed to keep you in the dark.
Sources and further reading:
The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy
Mystery of the Centennial Light [ Another story that is the near inverse of this one ]
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