Emily Redman: Fiat Lux, or Who Invited Thomas Edison to the Tea Party?
Emily Redman is a PhD candidate in the history of science at the University of California at Berkeley who, when not distracted by enviro-political issues of yore, studies the history of mathematics education reform in the twentieth-century United States.
The planet is in the spotlight somewhat literally these days. Arguably interchangeable locutions of global warming, climate change, or "solar variations" have made headlines in the past decades—yes, those same decades that brought us An Inconvenient Truth and extreme storms. The underlying science has effectively bisected Washington, with the left and right offering partisan legislation aimed at the decidedly nonpartisan climate. Yet despite circular debates on Capitol Hill, options are being proffered to Americans for their fight to protect the global environment.
Efforts from Capitol Hill, you say? Given American's conflicted relationship with the regulatory powers of Washington, this fight is unsurprisingly politicized. Where the battlegrounds lie, however, is at once surprising and historically awkward.
Recently, media channels have brought to our attention the efforts underway to provide Americans with alternatives—federally mandated alternatives, no less—to the good ol' familiar light bulb. Scientists and engineers, tasked with developing eco-friendly light sources that mimic Thomas A. Edison's (1847-1931) incandescent bulb aesthetically while improving on it technologically have unveiled an LED version of the original with all the federal subsidies and fanfare that Washington can offer. This past summer, Philips, the Netherlands-based producer of consumer electronics, collected $10 million in prize money for developing a highly efficient alternative to the standard sixty-watt incandescent. The award, familiarly known as the L Prize, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in the wake of George W. Bush-era legislation that requires light bulb makers to improve efficiency of bulbs by twenty-five percent. The L Prize, then, was instituted as a government-sponsored nudge to spur lighting manufacturers to develop higher efficiency alternatives to Edison-era products disparaged as "dated" on the prize website. And in a dangerous flirtation with the "nanny state," the Website promises the prize will drive market adoption.
Apparently, however, Edison's familiar glass-bulb-meets-metal-filament is near and dear to many American hearts. Despite those years of thoughtlessly tossing cardboard boxes of replacements into our shopping carts, we've become inextricably connected to these devices. Edison, we shout, championing for our American-scientist-hero who bore innovation. We are sure that there is some mistake, that Edison could not have led us astray; his light bulb seems irreplaceable and must be compatible with modern-day America....