Is Calling Someone’s Smile “Incandescent” Now Prohibited by Law?

No, don’t be silly (that’s my job)

By Ed Goldman

It’s been a little more than two months since the plants that manufactured incandescent bulbs in America went dark, so to speak. As first reported by WHSV-TV in Harrisonburg, Virginia, “On August 1, a new ban on the manufacturing and selling of incandescent light bulbs started. The new light bulb ban prevents consumers from purchasing any bulbs under 45 lumens per watt.”  

At the time, I was initially afraid to get an idea since I wasn’t sure an LED bulb spiraling over my head would properly convey the traditional cartoon spirit of innovation. 

Then I realized that most of the light bulbs in my home already were LED bulbs—or if not, incandescent bulbs which, before I bought my place, had achieved immortality by becoming Satanists.

The point is that energy-efficient bulbs often strongly resemble the now-obsolete planet-destroying ones. So not only can I still experience a flicked-on bulb over my head whenever inspiration strikes, but now, presumably, the idea will last much longer. 

My only concern about the legally mandated switch (ha!) to LED is that it may dim (ha, ha!) the importance of the incandescent lightbulb in world history—not to mention that I can no longer use the joke “If not for Thomas Edison, we’d all be watching TV by candlelight” without adding footnotes to the punchline. If you’re a member of Toastmasters International, you know that needing to explain a one-liner can really take the oomph out of it.

As alluded to above (but far from clarified, I’ll admit), Thomas Edison patented his incandescent light bulb in 1879. He even did it again a year later for reasons unclear to me. Maybe Edison had toggled a dimmer switch onto the first one, making it difficult for the U.S. Patent Office to review his paperwork. He was known to be on the eccentric side. In fact, his diet consisted mostly of glasses of milk. They should use his likeness in those “Got Milk?” ads.

The fact is, almost 40 years before Edison put his Menlo Park staffers on the case, other inventors had created an electric light. But once you turned it on, it didn’t last very long. 

This was problematic because in those days, every novel was a minimum 873 pages; readers couldn’t absorb more than the prologue before it was lights out. You had to assume that Charles Dickens was heading somewhere when he opened “A Tale of Two Cities” with the famous words, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness.” No kidding about that last part. And just when you were settling in for a solid night of bathtub reading. 

Yet once Edison and the gang fixed a filament flaw, the incandescent lightbulb became a fixture (ha, ha, ha!) of modern life. 

Unfortunately, it also spawned the creation of Reddy Kilowatt in 1926, a bizarre stick-figure cartoon whose head was a lightbulb and his scrawny physique an unintentional ad for the necessity of including gluten, fats and carbs in a healthy diet.