This Light Bulb Has Been Burning Since 1901

[00:00:00]This light bulb is on right now. It was on an hour ago. It was on the day you were born.

[00:00:08]It hangs from a cord in a firehouse in Liverour, California, above the fire trucks. And with a handful of interruptions, the longest about a week, it has been burning since 1901.

[00:00:19]No one alive today remembers it being new. [music] The town calls it the Centennial Light.

[00:00:31]In 1901, electric light was still a small miracle. Out of every hundred American homes, fewer than 10 had it.

[00:00:39]The other 90 still at their homes with gas, oil, and candle light.

[00:00:44]And in the farm town of Liverour, California, Dennis Bernol, the man who owned the local power company, gave the fire department a gift. One light bulb.

[00:00:54]It was handblown glass with carbon filament wound in a loop. A French engineer named Adolf Chalet designed it and the Shelby Electric Company of Shelby, Ohio built it. The fireman hung it in the host cart house on L Street so they could find their gear at night.

[00:01:08]They screwed it in and they turned it on. And I'd imagine after admiring the bulb for a few moments, they got on with their day.

[00:01:18]This bowl would outlast nearly everyone in this story. The men who hung it retired, the host cart house emptied and the world kept spinning.

[00:01:28]The bulb moved first to Second Street and then in 1903 to the new Station 1.

[00:01:33]The Shelby Electric Company, the people who made it, were taken over by General Electric and the Shelby bulb was discontinued.

[00:01:42]And then in 1924, representatives of the world's largest light bulb makers sat down together in Geneva. Ozram, Phillips, and General Electric's overseas companies. [music] This group became known as the Feebas Cartel.

[00:01:57]They agreed in writing that a light bulb should live 1,000 hours, not because it has to, but because a bulb that dies sells its replacement.

[00:02:06]The manufacturers argued that the shorter lifespan was the cost of making bulbs brighter and more efficient. Their own records also show that the bulbs were tested against the limit and factories could be punished when their bulbs lasted too long.

[00:02:20]By the time the Feebas cartel had signed that agreement, the bulb in Livermore had already been burning for about 200,000 hours.

[00:02:30]In 1937, Station One was remodeled around the Livermore bulb. It went dark for about a week, the longest interruption of its life, and then it came back on.

[00:02:44]It took almost a century for anyone to ask how old it actually was. In 1972, a Cub reporter named Mike Dunston started pulling on the thread. Old-timer Stories, Fire Department records, and the Burnal family. On January 13th, the Livermore Herald and News ran his story.

[00:03:02]the headline, "Light bulb may be Earth's oldest."

[00:03:06]And Mike Dunston didn't stop at the paper. He wrote to the editor of Guinness Book of Records, and Guinness verified his claims.

[00:03:14]Today, the record stands and it reads, "Longest burning light bulb.

[00:03:20]In 1976, the bulb itself made one last move to Fire Station 6, where it hangs today. The firemen wouldn't risk unscrewing it. Instead, they cut the cord and carried it across town in a specially built box alongside a police and firet truck escort. It was burning again in about 23 minutes.

[00:03:42]In 2001, the bulb turned 100. There was a party at the firehouse and the bulb got something new, a webcam.

[00:03:51]Watch closely. The fire trucks come and go. The picture gets sharper. The bulb gets new cameras. And even those wear out and get replaced.

[00:04:26]On the evening of May 20th, 2013, the camera saw a first. The light went out.

[00:04:33]It stayed out all night, 9 hours and 45 minutes. A viewer named Frederick Goodwin spotted it first on Facebook, and at 8:45 in the evening, Cory Lewis found its time of death in the camera's frames.

[00:04:48]The bulb's website still thinks them both by name.

[00:04:52]In the morning, there was a TV reporter at the station taking portraits of a dead light bulb.

[00:04:59]Soon after, an electrician came to pronounce it dead and found out the bulb was fine.

[00:05:05]What had died was the power supply, a modern, uninterruptible power supply. It had been installed in late 2001 alongside the camera, and the deputy fire chief later explained their thinking. The camera would record every second. We didn't want the light to be out during a power failure.

[00:05:24]They ran an extension cord around the corpse of its life support, and the light came back on at 60 W, its old self, for a few hours, like it was 1901.

[00:05:34]Then it settled back down on its own to a 4 W glow.

[00:05:38]So much of modern life is built around replacement. Phones, appliances, [music] and light bulbs to name a few. That may sound cynical, but a century ago, the largest bulb manufacturers read a replacement cycle into their own standard.

[00:05:54]The Livermore bulb had come before that agreement. And whatever its makers intended, it was built before a long life became a problem.

[00:06:02]But maybe that agreement is part of why bulbs keep getting better. They're brighter, cheaper, and they require a tenth of the power.

[00:06:14]Or maybe it was just about selling more bulbs.

[00:06:17]That's something that I'll let you decide on your own.

[00:06:24]In June of 2015, the firehouse threw the bulb a party for its 1 millionth hour of service. There was a cake shaped like a bulb, carbon filament, and all. And recently on June 6, 2026, alongside reaching 1,100,000 hours of service, the fire department celebrated the bulb's 125th birthday with a cake and a birthday song.

[00:06:48]Scientists have even fired lasers at its sister bulbs to study what made them different. And the answer is not one miracle, but several ordinary things working together.

[00:06:59]The filament is carbon and much thicker than the filament in modern incandescent bulbs.

[00:07:04]At 4 watts, it barely gets warm. And because it's almost never switched off, it has avoided the thermal shock that kills most bulbs.

[00:07:13]It's not unexplainable. The bulb was built differently, used gently, and mostly left alone.

[00:07:21]Everything around this bulb has been replaced. the company that made it, the machines built to keep it on, and the cameras that have watched it. The bulb is dimmer than it started, but it's still here.

[00:07:37]The world will keep asking you to become something new, but I want you to keep a little of the centennial bulb with you anyways. You don't have to burn the brightest. You just have to burn steady.

[00:07:51]Left Running is a series about machines nobody turned off. Subscribe and I'll show you the next one.