I, Light Bulb with Bonus eBook

Michael Patrick Leahy, Howard M. Brandston

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062115379
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

New from Broadside Books' Voices of the Tea Party. I, Light Bulb: A Death Row Testimonial as told to Michael Patrick Leahy, demonstrates how the American economy has gone from free markets to politically correct, government controlled crony capitalism in the half century since Leonard E. Read wrote the classic essay I, Pencil. Leahy tells the story of the ban on the current generation of incandescents from the perspective of a condemned 100 watt light bulb. In the voice of the light bulb, Leahy points out the need for political activism to reverse this ban, arguing that it not onlyprevents an innocent incandescent light bulb from continuing a useful economic life, it also deprives every American of their own economic liberty and freedom of choice.

Readers who buy I, Lightbulb will also receive the bonus companion e-book The Disastrous Lightbulb Ban by Howard Brandston, at no additional cost. Brandston, the internationally recognized expert on lighting most well known for lighting the Statue of Liberty, explains why the federal government's ban on the current generation of incandescent light bulbs is such a bad idea. He explains how in 2007 a Democrat controlled Congress, the lamp manufacturers, the Department of Energy, and George W. Bush combined to force us to replace inexpensive and safe incandescent light bulbs with expensive, unsafe Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs that contain mercury. In this companion book to I, Light Bulb, Brandston concludes by encouraging citizen political activism to repeal this ridiculous ban.

Contents

I, Light Bulb

My Grandfather, Invented by Thomas Edison

My Father, the Tungsten Filament Bulb

I Am Born as a Soft Light Incandescent Light Bulb

I Am Sentenced to Die

Footnotes

About Michael Patrick Leahy

I, Light Bulb

I am a 100-watt incandescent light bulb and I have been sentenced to death by the federal government. I will be executed at one minute after midnight on January 1, 2012.

I serve but one purpose, and that is to cast light where there was none before. I do my job very well and very inexpensively. I do it so well, in fact, that every house and office in the United States is familiar with me or my siblings.

Last year, over one billion incandescent light bulbs like me and my siblings of the 40-watt and 60-watt variety were sold in the United States.1 We joined over five billion incandescent light bulbs already at work throughout the country, available to provide pleasant light anywhere, anytime, at the turn of a switch.

And yet I stand wrongly accused and unjustly condemned, sentenced to die by the hand of Big Government.2 How did this happen? What unseen forces put me on death row? The public needs to know the names of the villains who orchestrated this miscarriage of justice. Who conducted the kangaroo court filled with trumped up charges against me, brought by well-heeled lobbyists in $2,000 suits and Gucci shoes?

What powerful industry executives, stuck selling me at low prices and low profit margins, deceptively manipulated the government to force my execution, so they could replace me with unsafe, high-priced, high-margin, swirly spiraled Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs manufactured in China?

I accuse you, Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, as one of those industry executives who sacrificed my tungsten filament on the altar of your industrial planning.

I accuse you, Congressman Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and now the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, of moral cowardice and spinelessness. You denied me due process. You knowingly participated in my trial without allowing me the benefit of a defense attorney, the right to call my own witnesses, or the right to cross-examine witnesses brought by the prosecution against me. You carelessly co-sponsored Democrat Jane Harman’s amendment that simply extended the date of my execution by two years.

Your complicity is most odious because you pretend to support free market principles, and yet you acted as the lackey of the crony capitalists. And the price of your soul was low! General Electric’s PAC contributed only $2,000 to you in the year of my conviction.3

I accuse you, the several energy and environmental zealots who testified for the prosecution against me, of willful misrepresentation of the scientific and health facts when comparing my performance with that of CFLs.

And I accuse you, George W. Bush, of negligence, for signing my death sentence without fully understanding or caring to discover the injustice of my conviction.

To understand the forces that have condemned me, let me first tell you some of my family history.

My Grandfather, Invented by Thomas Edison

My grandfather was born in the Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory of inventor Thomas Alva Edison in 1879. Edison wanted to harness the power of electricity to provide convenient and efficient light for homes and businesses. Most houses in those days were lit in the evening by candle or kerosene oil lamp, which were neither safe nor particularly effective.

Remember the ill-fated Mrs. O’Leary whose cow supposedly kicked over the lantern and caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871?4 Edison thought inexpensive electrical lighting could prevent such tragedies in the future, and along the way bring its inventor great financial rewards. To be clear, he was motivated by the prospect of financial rewards because he believed practical electrical lighting would solve a host of problems. Besides the obvious safety concerns, kerosene oil lamps and gas lanterns were smelly and required constant cleaning. And the quality of light they cast was often unsteady. As a result, human productivity was severely limited by the constraints of darkness.

Though there wasn’t yet any capability to transmit and distribute electric power to households and businesses that might install these new incandescent bulbs, Edison knew that if there was money to be made in it, the free market would help him solve that problem.

Let’s consider for a moment the wondrous manner by which this unschooled but driven young man came to bring together just the right combination of people, materials, and other resources to begin the mission that he was born to undertake—the relentless invention of new products that people found useful.

In the nine decades since the ratification of the Constitution, the federal government had, with a few notable exceptions, not infringed upon the right of citizens to freely exercise their individual economic liberties. In addition, federal expenditures were very limited—never exceeding 4 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. There was no income tax, and, for the most part, the federal government didn’t pick winners and losers. It was true, however, that the railroad subsidies initiated in the 1860s and the tariffs that favored politically connected industries signaled the beginning of federal intervention in the free markets that would infect the political world several decades later.

Edison himself learned the hard way that it was individual people and businesses exercising their economic liberties that picked the winners and losers. They did so by paying in the marketplace for goods and services they wanted. At first, Edison invented products that caught his fancy. He considered it a significant accomplishment when he secured his first patent back in 1869—he was only 22 at the time—for an electric vote counting machine. But no one was interested in buying his wonderful invention.

Almost broke, he vowed that he would never again invent a product for which there was no demand. The “invisible hand” had taught Edison a valuable lesson.

The President in 1869—Ulysses S. Grant—didn’t appoint a commission to tell Edison that he should only invent products that met certain federally approved specifications. Congress didn’t pass a law authorizing the expenditure of federal funds at major universities for use by professors of physics to invent light sources they deemed winners.

No, it was the invisible hand of the market that provided him with the resources to create new inventions that people and businesses told him they found useful—by their willingness to pay him money for those inventions.

In 1871, at the age of 24, Edison secured his second patent, this time for his invention of a “universal stock printer,” a significant improvement on the first stock printer invented a few years earlier. He sold the patent and the invention to the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company for $40,000, a very large amount in those days.5 He used these funds to purchase an abandoned factory building in the city of Newark, New Jersey, and to hire a Swiss clock maker and an English shop foreman, both of whom possessed the skills he needed to help him invent more products.6

Three years later, Edison sold another invention—the quadruplex telegraph (which improved electrical telegraph transmission efficiency)—to Western Union for $10,000. Once again, he used these funds to build more facilities and hire more people who could help him invent more new products. This time, he decided to build the first modern research and development laboratory in the world. Edison called it his “invention factory,” and the marketplace provided him with the resources he needed to build it. He soon bought 34 acres of land in Menlo Park, New Jersey, at the time a rural area not too far from New York City, the center of finance for technological innovation. Over the next decade, his facility expanded to cover two city blocks.7

As he hired more assistants, he built more buildings for specialized purposes, including a carpenter shop, a blacksmith shop, a state-of-the-art machine shop, and a carbon shed—a simple building where dozens of kerosene lamps burned continuously. When he started work on the incandescent ligh...