The Curious Case of the CFL Light Bulb

Rob Collie (00:00): Hello, friends. A big theme we've been talking about lately is how quickly the status quo can change in the face of new developments. It turns out that once that idea is on your mind, you kind of start seeing it everywhere. And since it is on my mind and I am seeing it everywhere, I thought for this episode I'd share one of the examples that jumped out at me last week.

(00:20): So let's talk a little bit about the story of the compact fluorescent light bulb. Yeah, the CFL, but not the Canadian Football League, the other CFL. Now, what's your knee-jerk emotional reaction to the idea of CFL light bulbs? Is it positive? If it's positive for you, well, we're different because I hated these things. I hated the color of their light that made everything feel like a morgue or like a Walmart. I hated how long they took to warm up.

(00:48): A light bulb's number one job is to allow you to see things that you couldn't see before you turned on the switch. And my experience with CFLs was that you turned on the switch and you still couldn't see what you needed to see, at least not for about 10 seconds, which seems like a bad quality for a light bulb. Well, we moved into this house that we're in right now in 2018, and it was wall-to-wall equipped with CFL bulbs, every single ceiling light fixture, even the so-called floodlight bulbs, whose job it is to, yeah, flood the place with light, more like a trickle when you turn it on, right?

(01:23): Well, dozens and dozens of these things. And of course, I wanted to replace them all immediately, but my wife wouldn't let me. "It's wasteful," she said. "So you can replace them whenever they burn out," which, of course, takes forever. But for the past six years, every couple of months, one of them would die and I would celebrate and then replace it with a warmer, brighter, instant-on LED bulb.

(01:47): And I think we were about halfway through swapping them out after about six years, maybe a little bit more than half. But recently, we decided we were going to move. And when we had the realtor in, the first thing he said was, "If you're going to sell this place, you need to get all the CFLs out of here." So I got to swap out all the rest of them all at once, which was kind of bittersweet.

(02:07): It wasn't really the victory I was looking forward to because we're only going to be here another couple of weeks. This is a victory for the next homeowner, not for me. And then even after I'd removed them all, even after I'd swapped them out, the CFLs from this house, they got in one more parting shot, one final annoyance, because you're not supposed to just throw them away.

(02:27): Oh no! They're not just figuratively toxic, but literally toxic as well. These things contain mercury, so you got to take them to a hazardous waste place. These places have incredibly random hours and sometimes even require appointments. But lucky me, the big hardware store up the road, Lowe's in my case, has a bin where you can drop them. So I loaded up several dozen CFL bulbs and went down there.

(02:51): It turns out these things are so toxic, you can't just dump them in the bin. No, no, no, because they'll break and then out comes all that mercury. So you need to them up in these dedicated little plastic bags they have there at the bin. And I do mean little bags because they only hold like two bulbs each. In fact, the little metal mailbox type bin that you deposit them in, that drawer is so small it can't even hold three bulbs at once.

(03:14): I found that out the hard way. So I was there for like 20 minutes bagging, tying, depositing, and just frustrated the whole time. And also the whole time being absolutely positive that 99% of all CFL bulbs are not disposed of in this manner. Everyone's just throwing these things away. Because if everyone were doing it the right way, no one would stand for this at scale.

(03:36): Okay, so now I've ranted for a few minutes about how much I hate CFLs, and maybe you're wondering why. Well, did you notice the transitions? Do you remember switching two CFL light bulbs from incandescence? And do you remember, more importantly, switching away from them onto LED? That latter one, the transition from CFL to LED, has been called one of the fastest technology shifts in human history, but it happened with next-to-zero fanfare. It was just ho-hum.

(04:06): Even though, as I've said, CFLs positively sucked and LEDs are like, mwah, kiss the ground amazing, it's just light bulbs and it's not something we pay that close of attention to. But imagine if you've been working in the light bulb industry. CFLs were famously very difficult to manufacture. For a while there, twisting those glass tubes into a spiral wasn't something anyone had figured out how to do with automated factory equipment.

(04:34): So the glass tubes were literally being hand-twisted in China. When they did figure out how to automate their manufacture, imagine how complicated that operation was. Molten glass, twisting it, got to make sure there aren't any leaks in it. Then you got to fill them with gas and seal them up. And don't forget toxic mercury. So the capital investment in manufacturing these things was significant.

(04:59): They were first invented in 1980 and didn't go on sale in a mainstream sense until 15 or more years later. That's a long run-up. Now, LEDs are easier to manufacture. So why weren't they dominant from the beginning? It's because no one had figured out how to make LEDs produce white light. Red LEDs and green LEDs had been around forever, but it took a while to crack blue, and then a little longer to get white working efficiently.

(05:26): That was finally solved in 1996 around the time that CFLs were actually going mainstream. And that invention, the invention of the white LED, literally won the Nobel Prize in Physics years later. But there was also a significant delay in years before white LED bulbs hit the market in any reasonable numbers. But when they did, whoosh! CFLs took about 20 years to reach their adoption peak at about 42% of the market.

(05:54): LED bulbs went from 3% of the market in 2013 to 51% in 2020, far eclipsing CFL's peak in seven short years. And today they're basically pretty close to 100%. So they surpassed CFLs in one-third of the time that it took CFLs to get to their peak, and then completely finished them off a few years later. And they pretty much banished incandescent and halogen bulbs along the way as well, which CFLs never did because, well, they sucked.

(06:23): Again, this all went down as a nothing burger to consumers of light bulbs. As much as I rail about it, my full on hatred for CFLs didn't truly ignite until I went from an LED lighted house back to one that was loaded with CFLs. But again, imagine if you had been in that industry manufacturing light bulbs and you were sitting on massive, massive investments in CFL manufacturing equipment, facilities, expertise, and methodology.

(06:50): And one day you start hearing that the white LED problem has been solved in a breakthrough so significant that it warranted the Nobel Prize. It was that big of a deal. "Oh, but they're not energy efficient," you tell yourself. "My investments are safe. I don't need to plan ahead for disruption." Okay, but then they crack the energy efficiency problem. Well, then you tell yourself, "Well, they're still expensive to manufacture."

(07:14): But do you ask yourself why they're expensive? Are those reasons durable, or are they just a point in time? Nah, you don't even think about that. You just tell yourself these things are just too damn fancy. And besides, all of our competitors are in the same boat. We all have massive investments in CFL. Surely that has to be durable, right? We can't all be swept aside.

(07:37): Okay, you get the idea. I don't think you would do that. And of course, it's my intent to make sure that you don't. When something is flawed and something better is invented, the kite is going to move when the wind changes. And CFLs did suck. Okay, fine, they were more energy efficient than incandescent. But given the toxic mercury problem and the expensive manufacturer, was it even worth it?

(08:01): And then along came white LEDs with all the positives of incandescence and all the energy efficiency of CFLs, but with none of their downsides. Was it the end of the light bulb industry? No. But there were advantages to the first adopters. I don't think I had ever bought a light bulb manufactured by Philips before their LEDs came out. And now basically like most of the light bulbs I buy are Philips.

(08:27): Sorry, GE. You were a God in the incandescent and CFL game, but it's Philips' market now. See the parallels? We've got a white LED level disruptor on the scene in the form of generative AI code writing tools. Be Philips, not GE.