MORE MARXIST ENERGY CONSERVATION

Many thanks to reader M.M. Chase of Pasadena, Calif., who noticed my question mark: the film featuring Marxist energy conservation (burning the carriages of a train in the engine boiler) was The Marx Brothers Go West (1940).

Some other ways of conserving energy are equally effective, though not as hilarious as the Marxist original (it is my belief that Harpo will live long after Karl is forgotten). There is, for example, a variety of disks to be inserted between lightbulb and socket that are claimed to save energy.

The claim that this conserves 50% of the energy is a Nader-type halftruth: it is perfectly true in itself, but fails to point out that you can conserve a full 100% of the energy by providing the socket with no bulb at all.

There are other such "buttons" claiming to conserve energy. I do not know all their principles, but the incandescent light bulb turns 90% to 95% of the electric input energy into unwanted heat, and I cannot conceive of anything in a button that would significantly affect this shamefully low efficiency.

However, when you talk about conserving bulbs rather than the energy they consume, then this is an altogether different matter. Bulbs almost never burn out suddenly after being on for some time; they go in a brief flash when the light is turned on. There is a good reason for this: the resistivity of most metals increases with temperature, so that a cold filament is close to an electrical short that dissipates approximately 20 times the rated power. If fuses reacted instantly, they would blow every time a light is switched on, but they are made to hold through the roughly 0.1 seconds during which the cold filament heats up to about 4,000 degrees F. At that temperature, the resistance of the filament has so increased that the current and dissipated power are down to their normal ratings.

To stress something, even briefly, by 20 times its normal rating, is to put a 1-ton boulder on a supermarket cart, so it is not surprising that bulbs virtually always fail during switch-on; steady burning also ages the filament, but that essentially amounts to making it more likely to snap when stressed.

Such thermistor buttons are used in the space program and are now sold by retail outlets under the name of Bulb-Miser for $3 to $4.50 each; but AtE subscribers identifying themselves as such can buy them for $24/dozen postpaid ($2/each) from Arnco International Ltd., Box 2707, Harbor, OR 97415, and though I have not personally tested them in a meaningful program (measurement of the failure rate in a prolonged test program of very many bulbs including a large control group without buttons), the principle on which they work is perfectly sound.

AtE has also been offered a 10% commission for recommending the product, but AtE takes no money other than subscriptions; besides, what is the value of a recommendation by an author who gets his cut from the recommended product? I have therefore asked the manufacturers to pay the commission to the Committee for a Free World in New York.