The Eternal Lamp & The Windmills

USA/WORLD. The most famous lamp of the world is installed in a firefighters station in Livermore, California. Is alight to 111 years. Uninterruptedly. Its power is 60 watts but currently uses just over 6% of that potence. It is an object that arouses the curiosity of scientists for an obvious reason: their longevity in operation.

With over a century old, this lamp appears in Guinness Book of Records, and - now - has been studied by a Spanish businessman of Cordova, Benito Muros. This man intends to design a lamp with the capacity to work forever.

The eternal lamp will be underpinned by the concept of obsolescence "un-planned" It means that the product is projected to not break, to do not suffer a colapse after a calculated time. Mr. Muros explained that the eternal lamp is of organic nature, not generate waste and can to save more than 92% in the electricity bills.

However, when speaks of the eternity of the lamp, Mr. Muros is using hyperbole. But, he ensures that, if successful, your lamp will can work during a life; 100 years without problems - counting on a wiring adequate and well maintained. The secret of this durability is to use iron with low carbon content.

Mr. Muros said that the conductors of current lamps are made of iron that have high carbon the carbon, with time, suffers microruptures causing the fatal failure of the device. He comments: Many manufacturers claim that their bulbs can last 1.000, 1.5000 or 2.000 hours, but no one is controlling the time to confirm these claims. In fact, many times, a conventional lamp burning in the same hour in which it is installed.

Mr. Muros already has a line of lamps "eternal" for domestic use and public. One of these lamps for domestic use has a potence of 60 watts but consumes only 6 watts. The cost, that can still considered high, is 26 euros. But the durability worth the price. For while, the lamps are handcrafted and the manufacturer guarantees that your product has no competitor similar throughout the world.

The inventor is essentially against so-called programmed obsolescence. He says: Today, many industries [by obvious interest] create their products with planned obsolescence. Objects are programmed to become useless after a certain time. We want to encourage other manufacturers to abolish this policy. Much of the current economy is based on this policy that compels people to buy electric and electronic products because they break, inevitably, after some time. [I will permit to me a comment: evidently, Mr. Muros discovered gunpowder!]

THE EXHAUSTING CULTURE OF THE CONTINUOUS UPGRADE

The idea is not new. The propaganda that spreads the idea that a product has become obsolete even before it be broken, that the consumer needs a more modern model of a new object, this ideology - feeds, for over two centuries, the economy of the mass consumption of all kinds of goods. Mr. Muros has good intentions but, as Don Quixote of Cervantes, his battle has everything to be inglorious. He fights a world of windmills and windmills are insensitive.

Humans, individuals, by contrast, are sensitive. They are sensitive - even too much - to the appeals of the adverts: the a launch of car the year, new "generations" of computers, mobile phones, the fashions invented of all genres. Many advertising messages - reach the extreme of cruelty, seeking to make the citizen feel ridiculous or minor, if he or she can not buy this or that newly released product.

The desire for novelty, even if only a new look on something old, comes to the extreme distress of compulsion. There are people so impressionable, so impressionable that they are able to transgress the bounds of legality, committing crimes to get the things that are advertised in the media as news, many of them simply unnecessary, dispensable.

The planned obsolescence reaches up human creatures: it is necessary to buy a new body, a new face because men or a women could be considered obsolete beings - too; objects destinated to the garbage, to the attics of societies. It is the delusion of postmodernity. A mental illness called consumerism.

SOURCE: DE JORGE, J. Un español inventa una bombilla que dura toda la vida
ABC/Es, published em 16.03/2012
[http://www.abc.es/20120316/ciencia/abci-espanol-inventa-bombilla-dura-201203161432.html]
Supplementary text: Lygia Cabus