Still Burning: The 1901 Centennial Light

There is a lightbulb in California that has been glowing since 1901, and it is still on today. In this episode, we explore the true story of the Centennial Light, how it survived a century of technological change, and why its endurance has less to do with lost engineering secrets and more to do with the tradeoffs we choose. Then we chat with Comedian Jay Black!

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If you grew up anywhere near a public school classroom, a museum, or a motivational poster printed sometime between 1983 and 2007, you were probably told some version of this story: lightbulbs used to last forever, but companies realized that was bad for business, so they made them worse on purpose. Planned obsolescence. The Phoebus cartel. A shadowy group of manufacturers deciding that lightbulbs should burn out after 1,000 hours, not because they had to, but because they wanted to sell you more of them.

It is a story that feels true. It fits neatly into our modern understanding of capitalism, disappointment, and the uncanny experience of replacing a bulb in your house only to watch it die again six months later like it’s reenacting a very small, very spiteful version of Groundhog Day.

And then someone always adds the kicker. Somewhere, they say, there is a lightbulb that proves it. A lightbulb that never burned out. A lightbulb that’s been on for over a hundred years.

That part sounds like the exaggeration. That sounds like the myth bolted onto the lesson. That sounds like the thing your uncle says at Thanksgiving right before he starts talking about how they don’t make refrigerators like they used to and how his lasted 42 years and also ran quieter than your car.

Except this time, that part is true.

There really is a lightbulb that has been burning, almost continuously, since 1901. It has outlived every person who installed it. It has survived wars, recessions, technological revolutions, and multiple global pandemics. It has been photographed, filmed, live-streamed, argued about, measured, doubted, and confirmed. It has its own webcam. It has its own Wikipedia page. It has its own fan mail.

It is known as the Centennial Light, and it is currently hanging from the ceiling of a fire station in Livermore, California.

And the reason it is still on tells us something very different from the simple “they don’t make them like they used to” story.

Before we get to Livermore, though, we need to take a couple of side roads. Because lightbulbs did not arrive fully formed, glowing eternally, like gifts from the electrical gods. They were messy. They were dangerous. They were experimental. And for a long time, they were not especially good at their job.

When people talk about Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, what they usually mean is that Edison developed a commercially viable incandescent lamp that could be produced, powered, and sold at scale. Electric light existed before him. Arc lamps lit streets and factories, but they were blindingly bright, loud, and impractical for homes. Edison’s contribution was not the idea of glowing filament, but the system. Power generation. Distribution. Switches. Sockets. The whole ecosystem.

Early incandescent bulbs used filaments made from carbonized materials. Bamboo. Cotton. Cellulose. Anything that could be shaped into a thin thread and survive being heated to the point of glowing. These filaments were fragile, inconsistent, and wildly variable. Some burned out in hours. Some lasted longer. Almost none behaved the same way twice.

Brightness was the goal. Longevity was secondary.

If you were lighting a home in 1895, you wanted something that was brighter and safer than gaslight. You were not yet obsessed with efficiency ratings or rated lifespans printed on the side of a box. Electricity itself was still new enough to feel miraculous. A bulb that lasted a few hundred hours was acceptable if it meant you were no longer open-flaming your living room every evening.

This matters, because the Centennial Light comes from this era. It was not designed to be immortal. It was designed to be stable, conservative, and safe.

The bulb was manufactured by the Shelby Electric Company of Shelby, Ohio. Shelby Electric was one of many regional manufacturers producing carbon-filament bulbs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were hand-assembled devices, not precision-engineered consumer products. The filament inside the Centennial Light is carbon, not tungsten. It is thicker than modern filaments. It runs at a much lower temperature. And it produces a very dim, amber glow by modern standards, roughly equivalent to a night light.

In 1901, the bulb was installed in a firehouse in Livermore. At the time, firehouses needed reliable, always-on illumination. They did not care about brightness. They cared about not having to replace bulbs in the middle of the night when something was literally on fire.

And then something quietly remarkable happened.

Nothing happened.

The bulb stayed on.

The firehouse moved locations several times over the decades, and the bulb moved with it. It was turned off only a handful of times, mostly due to building renovations or power outages. In 1937, it was briefly disconnected during a move and then turned back on. It dimmed slightly, but continued working.

By the 1970s, people started to notice.

By the 1980s, it became a local curiosity.

By the early 2000s, it became an internet legend.

Today, the bulb hangs in Fire Station No. 6 in Livermore, protected by a dedicated power supply and monitored continuously. It has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest-burning lightbulb in the world.

And yes, it is still on.

Here is where the story usually turns into an indictment. Look at this bulb, people say. Proof that companies could make things last forever if they wanted to. Proof that everything we buy now is intentionally disposable.

But the truth is more complicated and, in some ways, more interesting.

The Centennial Light lasts so long precisely because it is inefficient.

It runs at very low power. The filament is thick and robust. The bulb is never switched on and off, which is one of the most stressful moments in a bulb’s life due to thermal expansion. It produces very little light. It wastes enormous amounts of energy as heat, relative to its output.

If you tried to light your house with Centennial Light replicas, you would hate it. You would be living in a perpetual haunted hallway. You would trip constantly. You would also be using far more electricity to get far less illumination.

Modern bulbs are designed to do the opposite. They are bright. They are efficient. They push materials close to their limits to maximize output per watt. That tradeoff shortens lifespan.

The famous Phoebus cartel did exist. In the 1920s, major manufacturers agreed to standardize bulb lifespans around 1,000 hours. But this was not purely about greed. It was also about standardization, brightness, and safety. Longer-lasting bulbs existed at the time, but they were dimmer and less efficient. Consumers preferred brighter light, even if it meant replacing bulbs more often.

The Centennial Light is not a suppressed miracle. It is a survivor of a different design philosophy.

And yet, there is something undeniably poetic about it.

This bulb has been burning since Theodore Roosevelt was president. It was on during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It glowed through World War I and World War II. It stayed lit while radios became televisions, televisions became flat, phones lost their cords, and computers stopped being rooms and started being pockets.

It has become a symbol, not because it is technologically superior, but because it refuses to participate in the normal lifecycle of objects.

There is also a subtle human element here that often gets overlooked. The people of the Livermore fire department noticed the bulb and chose to care about it. They chose to protect it. They chose not to replace it “just because.” At several points in history, it could have been discarded as obsolete. Instead, it was treated as a quiet coworker who had simply been there longer than anyone else.

That kind of continuity is rare.

We live in a world where even digital things vanish. Links rot. Platforms die. Accounts disappear. And yet there is a physical object, screwed into a socket, drawing a trickle of electricity, doing the same thing it has done every moment of every day for over a century.

It does not flash. It does not demand attention. It just glows.

When you step back and look at the Centennial Light with fresh eyes, one of the strangest things about it is not that it still works, but that it was never supposed to matter.

No one installed it thinking, this will be historic. It was not commemorative. It did not mark an opening day or a dedication. It was not ceremonial. It was infrastructure. It was screwed in because the room needed light and this was the bulb they had.

That accidental quality is part of why it has survived. The bulb was never upgraded because no one was trying to optimize it. It was never replaced because it never failed. And over time, that lack of intervention became its greatest protection.

In the middle of the 20th century, as lighting technology improved dramatically, most older systems were aggressively replaced. Firehouses modernized. Wiring was redone. Fixtures were swapped. The fact that the Centennial Light made it through those transitions is not a miracle so much as a bureaucratic fluke. It was working, and there was no budget line item for replacing a thing that was already doing its job.

That matters, because when people point to the Centennial Light as evidence of a lost golden age of manufacturing, they are usually imagining a world where everything was built like this on purpose. But the historical record does not support that idea.

Early electric lighting was wildly inconsistent. For every bulb that lasted decades, there were thousands that failed quickly. Shelby Electric did not advertise century-long lifespans. They advertised reliability relative to competitors. The Centennial Light is not representative of the average experience. It is the statistical outlier that survived long enough to become symbolic.

Engineers who have examined the bulb emphasize this point repeatedly. Its longevity comes from a convergence of factors that would almost never be replicated intentionally at scale. The filament is carbon, which evaporates more slowly at lower temperatures. The bulb is operated at very low wattage. The voltage supplied to it is carefully regulated. Most importantly, it is almost never turned off.

That last detail is critical. The most damaging moment in a lightbulb’s life is not when it is glowing steadily. It is the instant it is switched on. The sudden rush of current causes rapid heating, expansion, and mechanical stress. Do that enough times, and microscopic weaknesses become fractures. The Centennial Light has avoided that cycle almost entirely.

In other words, it has survived not because it is stronger than modern bulbs, but because it has been allowed to live a much gentler life.

There is also the question of brightness, which often gets glossed over in retellings. The Centennial Light produces roughly four watts of illumination. By modern standards, that is barely functional. It would not meet safety codes for most indoor spaces today. It would not satisfy anyone trying to read, work, or do literally anything requiring vision beyond not bumping into furniture.

That dimness is not a flaw. It is the tradeoff.

As lighting technology evolved, consumer preferences shifted dramatically. People wanted brighter rooms. Factories needed more illumination for productivity and safety. Streets needed to be visible from greater distances. Achieving that meant pushing filaments hotter and thinner. Hotter filaments glow brighter. Thinner filaments heat faster. Both of those changes increase stress and reduce lifespan.

This is where the story of planned obsolescence often oversimplifies things.

The Phoebus cartel, formed in 1924, did standardize bulb lifespans around 1,000 hours. That decision is frequently framed as pure corporate greed. But the internal documents and engineering context show a more complicated reality. Manufacturers were balancing brightness, efficiency, safety, and predictability. A bulb that lasted 2,500 hours but produced dimmer light was not necessarily preferable to consumers, especially when electricity was becoming cheaper and expectations were changing.

The Centennial Light was never part of that conversation. It predates it entirely. It exists outside the consumer market logic that shaped modern lighting.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

If the Centennial Light is not proof that companies are withholding immortality from us, why does it still feel like a rebuke?

Part of the answer lies in how rare long-term continuity has become. Very few physical objects are allowed to remain in uninterrupted service for a century. Buildings are renovated. Systems are replaced. Devices are upgraded not because they fail, but because something newer exists.

The Centennial Light was spared that fate largely because it was unremarkable. It did not draw attention to itself until attention came looking for it.

Once it became famous, however, it entered a new phase of existence. It stopped being just a bulb and became a responsibility.

By the late 20th century, the Livermore fire department understood that if the light went out, it would not just be a maintenance issue. It would be the end of something irreplaceable. There are no exact replicas. Shelby Electric no longer exists. Carbon filament bulbs are no longer manufactured at scale.

So the bulb was protected. A dedicated power supply was installed. Backup systems were put in place. It was moved carefully during renovations. At one point, when the firehouse was relocated, the bulb was transported under controlled conditions and reinstalled with almost ritualistic caution.

This introduces a strange paradox.

The Centennial Light is often cited as an example of durability without maintenance, but its continued survival now depends on active care. It is no longer just enduring. It is being preserved.

That distinction matters, because it changes what the bulb represents.

It is no longer simply a relic of early electrical engineering. It is a collective decision to keep something going even when it no longer serves a practical purpose. The light is not needed. The firehouse could function perfectly well without it. It remains because people want it to remain.

In that sense, the Centennial Light has more in common with a historic building or a preserved ship than with a consumer product. It is an artifact that still performs its original function, which is a rare and oddly moving thing.

There have been moments when its survival felt precarious. Power outages have occurred. Earthquakes have rattled the region. In 2013, a failure in the bulb’s power supply caused it to briefly go dark, sparking immediate concern and rapid intervention. When it was relit, the event was treated less like replacing a part and more like reviving a patient.

That emotional response tells you everything you need to know about how its meaning has evolved.

What began as a utilitarian object has become a symbol of persistence, not because it was designed to be symbolic, but because it refused to leave.

And this is where the Centennial Light stops being a story about lightbulbs and starts being a story about us.

We live in a culture that equates improvement with replacement. Newer is assumed to be better. Longevity is often treated as accidental rather than valuable. The idea that something could simply keep working, quietly, without optimization or rebranding, feels almost subversive.

The Centennial Light does not argue against progress. It does not suggest that we should return to dim, inefficient lighting. What it does suggest is that we rarely let things age naturally anymore. We intervene early. We replace preemptively. We optimize away continuity.

There is a humility in the fact that the longest-lasting lightbulb in history is not the brightest, the smartest, or the most efficient. It is just the one that was left alone.

And that is perhaps the most uncomfortable lesson of all.

Because it means that durability is not always about superior materials or secret designs. Sometimes it is about restraint. About choosing not to push something to its limits just because we can.

The Centennial Light is still on today, not because it beat the system, but because it existed before the system learned how to demand more from everything.

It glows softly. It does not flicker. It does not compete for attention. It simply continues.

And that is why it endures.

The internet says it’s true

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