Burning lamps may live for much much longer

[SiEger]

Did you know that the same companies that makes old style lamps could make them last more than 10 times like now?
They put inside a small amount of air that will slowly burn the lamp. They do this because if they did not, they would simply be 10 times poorer...

[kam]

i have something heard about it but not from very good source

[Supernova]

Filthy

[manley_V]

at least filthy...   

[spic0m]

I'm not 100% sure but i know that they put some air or evaporated water inside to prevent the bulb from darkening due to the heat and material disipation, a variety of old tungsten lamps had a material which you had to shake it to get the lamp bright again after some operating hours.

[SiEger]

And this was causing the lamp to die faster?

[spic0m]

It's one or the other, you want to have a lamp bright for 2000 hours or a darkened one for 5000 hours? 

[Fan]

I think there are urban legends around this matter. Yes for sure General Electric, Philips, and others accorded each other in the 20th century to shorten life expectancy of their lamps.
On the other side, one can read about and see on line this stupid veneration of the Livermore's Centennial Light Bulb: it has such a poor efficiency that the money saved in no need to replace the bubble (some tenths of cents, say at most twice a year) is evaporated by the cost of electricity (24 times more over 100+ years), according to an estimation you can find on the wikipedia french page : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampoule_centenaire

Sorry for the legend.

To be completely honest, I must admit that this estimation DOES NOT takes into account the environment cost of replacing billions bubbles a year, as I'm sure these costs are not included in the "some tenth of cents" above... but don't forget that electricity production has an environment cost too, all that making a fully honest estimation very difficult for us simple and unaware people.