I toured a house looking to buy, 20 years ago. The old lady owner said "The light bulb over the door is going with me! I've had it 20 years and counting." It was a weird antique-looking thing with lots of wires and stuff in the clear glass bulb. Dim as hell. But 20 years! They don't make them like they used to.
The expected life of incandescent bulbs follows power laws with pretty big exponents: w.r.t. intensity its to the third power, w.r.t. voltage to the sixteenth power. So if you e.g. put a 230 V bulb on 110 V power, it will be dim as hell, but boi will it last!
So what this is saying is that light bulb companies engineered their bulbs to need regular replacement and we could have had much much longer lifespans with somewhat dimmer bulbs?
