TAKE TO CHANGE
H O W M A N Y D O E S I T TA K E T O C H A N G E A L I G H T B U L B ? / / S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 2 2 / / L M & M
How Many Does it
When do you remember the entire lighting industry undergoing a period of profound change? Depending on how long you’ve been in the game, you may have thought back to the LED revolution, or to HIDs, or even way back to the dawn of time when fluorescents arrived on the scene in the 1980s. When do you remember an idea coming along which saved energy while simplifying installation, use, and maintenance? You know you’ve had a game-changing idea when your invention becomes the very symbol of a game-changing idea. And what is that universal symbol, the one which appears in the thought bubbles above every comic strip character to have ever had a revelation? Perhaps an image of a light bulb has already flickered to life in your mind. Edison, of course, is commonly and wrongly credited with inventing the light bulb. Though Edison would come to hold well over a thousand patents (a number of which improved upon earlier designs), many inventors had been tinkering with glass vacuum bulbs and filaments decades before Edison was ever born. Likely, it comes as no surprise to anyone that virtually every invention in modern times has been built upon the foundation already laid down by many other thinkers. In the lighting industry, as in every other, the past and the present are inextricably linked. So how many people does it take to change a lightbulb? The correct answer: multitudes, and the number of people literally “changing the lightbulb” grows by the day. For an
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a Lightbulb? By Brian Hullfish