What a 1925 lightbulb cartel and a 125-year-old bulb reveal about the light you leave behind
Two days before Christmas in 1924, while the rest of Geneva strung up holiday lights, a group of executives met in that same city and decided how long your lightbulbs would last.
Nobody taught me this in school, and I’d bet nobody taught you either.
As the story goes, around that table sat the giants of the industry: Osram, Philips, Compagnie des Lampes, and General Electric among them. Weeks later they set up a Swiss company and named it Phoebus, after the god of light. Naming your bulb-shortening scheme after the god of light takes some nerve.
Then they made a rule they’d all follow that held for a generation. A household bulb would burn no longer than 1,000 hours.
Bulbs at the time ran 1,500 to 2,000 hours, and the number kept climbing. Great news if you owned a lamp. Terrible news if you sold them.
So they met and agreed to build them to last less.
How a cartel manufactured planned obsolescence
Factories mailed sample bulbs to a lab in Switzerland. If they burned too long, the company paid a fine and the fine climbed with every extra hour.
Sit with that one for a moment. Congratulations, your product beat the spec. That’ll cost you!
Engineers who had spent twenty years making bulbs last longer went back to work making them fail on schedule. Within about eight years, the average bulb from a member factory had lost a third of its life.
No press release announced any of this. No reporter broke the story. We know about it because Markus Krajewski dug through Osram’s old company records in a Berlin archive and published what he found in IEEE Spectrum. A 1949 U.S. antitrust case against General Electric and its affiliates added more to the pile.
Here’s the part I keep turning over in my mind.
The cartel had a defense, and it wasn’t crazy. Run a filament hot and you get brighter, whiter light from the same power, plus a shorter life. Run it cool and the bulb lasts, but the glow fades to a tired yellow. That trade off is real, and British regulators later said as much.
Those engineers weren’t lying about the trade. They were lying about why they made it, and accountability left the room.
When a moral choice gets filed as a technical one
Researchers Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick gave this its name in 2004: ethical fading. A choice that should land as a moral question gets handled as a business question instead, or an engineering question, and the moral part literally fades from sight.
Nobody in that room likely felt like a villain. They had a spec sheet, a lab in Switzerland, and a footnote about lumens per watt.
That’s what makes fading so hard to catch and even harder to correct. From the inside, it feels like good engineering. A choice that’s easy to justify.
Lead with Light™ calls this one the Fading Leader. Still running the loop. Still hitting the numbers. No longer able to feel the moral weight of the call being made.
The cartel didn’t fail at engineering. It failed at character.
The bulb that refused
Now drive to Livermore, California, walk into Fire Station No. 6, and look up.
Fifteen feet overhead hangs a hand-blown bulb with a carbon filament, made by the Shelby Electric Company of Shelby, Ohio. Installed in 1901. Still on. Guinness World Records calls it the longest-burning bulb in history, with more than a million hours on it.
The firefighters treat it like the oldest member of the crew. When it changed stations in 1976, it rode over in a custom box with a full escort, which beats the send-off most of us get at retirement. There’s a live webcam too, so somebody is watching a lightbulb still shining right now and enjoying every minute.
Now the detail most retellings skip: that bulb started life rated at 60 watts. Today, it pulls about four. Four watts is a nightlight. The most durable bulb in history has lasted, in part, by hardly shining at all.
Accounts differ on why. Some say the bulb faded over its lifetime, others that a Shelby worker accidentally blew a filament with unusually high resistance, making it a nightlight from day one. Either way, the reading I draw from it is mine, not a physicist’s.
I’ve reported to both bulbs, figuratively speaking
You probably have too.
One kind of leader runs the cartel play and never calls it that. They keep the interesting work, own the partner relationship, and remain the only name on every email that matters. Their people stay useful and easy to replace. From that chair, it all looks like efficiency.
Geneva turned a moral choice into an engineering spec. This one turns a growth choice into a delivery choice. Neither feels like a character question while you’re making it.
Then there’s the Livermore bulb. Decent, steady, well liked, running at four watts for twenty years. Never switched off, never turned up. Nobody ever found out what it could’ve done at sixty.
I’ve been that bulb, in seasons when keeping the peace felt safer than turning anything up.
A person isn’t a filament. Bulbs trade brightness for life. People don’t work that way. Turn someone up and they usually last longer, because skill compounds and tungsten only wears.
The meetings I stopped attending
Years ago, I led a team under constant pressure. We supported demanding partners and delivered more than most, which raised the bar, which raised the friction. My leader gave us no air cover. The heat came down and landed on us.
So when my direct reports met with their partners, I went along. Not to run the meeting. It was theirs to run. I sat in as a participant and kept my mouth shut, which for a communications guy takes real discipline.
Mostly I watched for the cue: that knowing look someone gives when they’re suddenly out of their depth. Then I’d lean in, say back what I understood, work the issue to agreement, and leave with a plan.
Afterward we’d debrief. Never about how I did. Always about what they learned and how they’d carry it alone next time.
Two reports, two timelines, one result. Both grew into running those meetings without me. I checked with the partners privately along the way, and the support held.
Then I stopped going. That was the end game all along. Not because I stopped caring, but because my team had their confidence back and our partners trusted us to juggle priorities and deliver.
The only planned obsolescence worth engineering
How we do what we do — how we lead — is as important as what we achieve. Those Geneva executives had rigor to spare. Sharp engineers, careful testing, strict enforcement. Not one of them stopped to ask what all that skill was in service of.
A bulb from 1901 still glows in a California firehouse because somebody made it well and other people looked after it for 125 years. Neither act was impressive on its own.
Build people who outlast your tenure, and you’ll never need to make yourself indispensable again. That’s the legacy question, small enough to hold in your hand. Not how brightly you burned but whether anything you touched is still lit after you left the building.
Parting Thoughts
Name one thing your team can’t do without you. Then name the person who should own it by year’s end. Start attending their meetings and listen more than you speak. Step in only when they ask or signal they’d like support with a knowing look. Coach afterward, in private.
You’ll know it worked the day they stop needing you in the room. It’ll be confirmed when you receive positive feedback from a partner who previously expressed concern.
Be clear. Be kind. Lead with Light! ✨
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