I have a nightlight in my house that has been burning since at least 1974. In the last 6 months or so, I’ve noticed it’s starting to flicker some; the bright yellow shine of the bulb punctuated with intervals of darkness. Nearly 50 years old. A miracle? No, actually just a product of normal industrial engineering.
My father-in-law, Walter Harlacher, was an engineer who worked in the lightbulb division at Westinghouse. Part of his job was to develop prototypes of bulbs that could potentially make their way to the consumer market. Sometime in the early 70s, he brought this one experiment home and gave it to his son, Eric, my future husband.
It was a single golden bulb encased in a cool looking, clear plastic housing with industrial-meets-art-deco-inspired aesthetics. There was an electrical plug on the end which made for a nifty nightlight for my then teenaged husband.
Was Eric especially attached to this nightlight, imbuing it with particular import or nostalgia? Not really; it was just one of his possessions which made the move to California when he did…with me in tow…in the late 80s. It’s been plugged into one or another bathroom outlet in every place we’ve lived.
Neither of us have given the thing much thought at all, until recently when I noticed one night in the bathroom that the bulb was definitely flickering.
Funny how you never notice something that runs surely and steadily until it starts to falter.
Many things in life are like that, I suppose. But it dawned on me how long we’ve had this light in our possession and I asked my husband about how…and when…he came to own it. That’s when he mentioned 1974.
That floored me. How can something like a lightbulb work for 50 years? Since it was a research and development project, never intended at that stage for consumers, there was no planned obsolescence engineered in. Planned obsolescence, of course, is an industrial design feature that renders a product obsolete or useless after a pre-determined period of time. The reason? To increase sales volume by deliberately shortening the lifespan of a thing. No lightbulb company would survive if one of their bulbs lasted 50 years.
I started to think about this in terms of people and how retirement has come to be a planned obsolescence of sorts. It’s implied that somewhere between the ages of 60-67, we’re past our usefulness when it comes to work, and we are either encouraged—or in some cases, forced — to leave the job. Sadly, our society sees older people to be as replaceable as consumer light bulbs or car parts.
Don’t get me wrong: I believe after a lifetime of working, people should be allowed to relax, retire, and spend their days playing pickle ball — if that’s what they want. I am grateful for social safety nets that are in place to ensure that. I fear and loathe the threatened erosion of safety nets like Medicare and social security, and worry that future generations will not be afforded the same guarantees. I believe we must do everything we can to fight against those cutbacks.
We live in a disposable society after all, but we can’t let that extend to our fellow man. We are built to last: maybe not physically but creatively and intellectually, at the very least. I think of that nightlight. With no one purposefully designing its demise, it can keep on going. Perhaps not as brightly as in its younger days, but it still shines. It is still useful. It still has potential. We all do.