One of my favourite things to wear is an tee-shirt with a Flash logo on it.
Flash, like the DC comic character. I’ve been reading Flash comics since I was probably 12 or 13 years old.
Actually, it was just before my 13th birthday. I picked up issue 323 of the comic, which featured Flash and the Reverse Flash running at each other, with the title “Flash vs. Flash”.
While I was familiar with the character before that point, and had read a few issues here or there, this was the first comic I ever bought with my own money (that my dad had given to me, natch), and I read and re-read the issue.
I collected every issue of the comic after that, which—alas—only went on for about two more years, when the series was cancelled. (It’s okay, it came back.)
Anyway. Somewhere along the line, I picked up this Flash tee-shirt. I think it was sometime around 1995 or so, because recently, I came across a bunch of old pictures, and I was wearing that shirt.
It’s still in my closet, and still in reasonable condition to wear, despite a hundred, maybe more, trips through the washing machine. Yes, the logo is cracked and worn, but it is still recognizable.
Meanwhile, I recently picked up a few solid colour tee-shirts for $5/apiece. I wore one once before the stitching in the underarm gave way.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the quality vs affordability vs cost of ownership.
We are coming up on the hundredth anniversary of the idea of planned obsolescence.
That idea is attributed to the former head of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, who in 1923 proposed that rather than make a car and sell the same car forever (like Henry Ford had been doing with the Model T since 1908, only changing the design as new technology came along that would improve it), each year, they would change the car somehow—a new colour or maybe a design tweak that differentiated the 1934 version of this car from the 1933 version. It was fashion over function.
But it was two years later that one of the most odious version of planned obsolescence was put into place.
We all remember the story of Edison inventing the light bulb in 1879. (Which, by the way, he totally didn’t. Edison’s big innovation was commercializing the light bulb, as well as buying out preexisting patents.) Between 1879 and 1900, various improvements were made making it so reliable that a light bulb installed in 1901 is still working today.
But everlasting light bulbs make for a bad business model. In Germany, for instance, light bulb manufacturer OSRAM saw sales drop from 63 million to 23 million in 1923. They blamed these long lasting light bulbs. So in 1925, a group of light bulb manufacturing companies, including OSRAM, Edison’s General Electric Associated Electrical Industries, and Philips, got together to set out a series of operational rules for lights. One of the big things they did was standardize the life expectancy of an incandescent bulb from an average of 2,500 hours to 1,000 hours. If a company produced a product that was too long lasting, they would get fined.
By 1934, the average bulb was lasting about 1200 hours. More importantly (for the companies) the cost of manufacturing the bulbs had come down and the number of bulbs being sold was up, and profits across the industry were up 25 percent.
As tensions between Germany and the rest of Europe and North America ramped up leading up to World War II, the cartel fell apart, but even now if you buy an incandescent bulb, it won’t last much past 1000 hours. This is the textbook case of industrial conspiracy; they even called themselves the Phoebus Cartel. Cartel? It even sounds like a conspiracy.
Here’s the deal, though. One of the reason for them creating bulbs that would only last 1000 hours? Was because after 1000 hours, the amount of light the bulb would put out would decrease over time. The famous million hour bulb that has been working since 1901? It’s barely puts out as much light as a night light, despite starting out life as a 60 w bulb. Yes, it works, but not very well.
So, what would have happened to the light bulb industry if bulbs lasted 2.5 times longer? Or forever? Would there have been a need to innovate, which led to LED lights, which last upwards of 50,000 hours and are far more efficient than incandescent, which convert 95 percent of its energy to heat? Or would we wander around our near-dark houses, thinking “I don’t need to change this bulb yet…”
At the same time, we had to live through nearly 100 years of changing every single light bulb in the world once or twice a year for that change to happen. Is pollution the price of progress, or is there a way to get to quality without the intervening steps of wastefulness?
There’s no easy answer, because nearly everything is a trade-off. You make light bulbs last longer, you might not get LED lights or even the computer revolution. Planned obsolescence got the world through the great depression, but it also helped create the environmental mess that we’ve been dealing with since the 1970s, not to mention the extreme consumer culture which prioritizes what is new over what is best. Quantity over quality.
As we as a society move towards rewarding products that have less of an environmental impact, what new can of worms will it open up? Each potential solution comes with its own set of problems.
When the government tells the market what to do, it runs the risk of stifling innovation. If the market is allowed to run ramshod over society, you get so much pollution that rivers literally catch fire. As in all things, finding the middle ground is difficult, and there is no roadmap to navigating the present to find the best possible future.
Sometimes, what is newest and shiniest isn’t the best. Sometimes it is that which is old and has proven the test of time that truly lasts. That which is quality lasts.
Or at least, that’s what I tell myself when I look in the mirror.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
