This is why we can't have nice things

this is a video about things like cars phones and light bulbs and an actual conspiracy that made them worse [Music] this video was sponsored by nordvpn more about them at the end of the video i am outside livermore fire station number six and in here they have the longest continuously on light bulb in the world it has been on for 120 years since 1901 there it is huh it's not even connected to a light switch but it does have a backup battery and generator so the big question is how has this light bulb lasted so long it was manufactured by hand not long after commercial light bulbs were first invented in yet it has been running for over a million hours way longer than any light bulb today is meant to last a while back a friend of mine told me this story that someone had invented a light bulb that would last forever years ago but they never sold it because an everlasting light bulb makes for a terrible business model i mean you would never have any repeat customers and eventually you would run out of people to sell light bulbs to i thought this story sounded ridiculous if you could make an everlasting light bulb then everyone would buy your light bulb over the competitors and so you could charge really high prices make a lot of money even if demand would eventually dry up i just couldn't imagine that we had better light bulbs in the past and then intentionally made them worse but it turns out i was wrong at least sort of inventing a viable electric light was hard i mean this is the typical incandescent design which just involves passing electric current through a material making it so hot that it glows you know less than five percent of the electrical energy comes out as light the other 95 is released as heat so these are really heat bulbs which give off a little bit of light as a byproduct you know the temperature of the filament can get up to 2800 kelvin that is half as hot as the surface of the sun at temperatures like those most materials melt and if they don't melt they burn which is why in the 1840s warren delarue came up with the idea of putting the filament in a vacuum ...