An international cartel secretly engineered light bulbs to burn out faster
In December 1924, the world's leading light bulb manufacturers, including Osram, Philips, and General Electric, gathered in Geneva to form the Phoebus cartel. Standard incandescent bulbs at the time regularly lasted 1,500 to 2,500 hours. The cartel agreed to strictly standardize bulb lifespans down to 1,000 hours, imposing heavy fines on any member factory whose bulbs burned longer. It stands as one of history's first and best-documented examples of organized planned obsolescence.
The Gathering in Geneva
In the early 1920s, the global incandescent lighting industry faced an unexpected problem born of its own engineering success. Manufacturing techniques had matured rapidly after the development of ductile tungsten filaments in the prior decade. As a result, commercial light bulbs regularly operated between 1,500 and 2,500 hours, with some lasting far longer. For lighting manufacturers, however, long-lasting lamps threatened a commercial dead end: once consumers installed reliable bulbs across homes, factories, and streetlamps, replacement sales plummeted, creating severe overcapacity across industrial assembly lines.
On December 23, 1924, top executives from the world's preeminent lighting producers met in Geneva, Switzerland, to solve this crisis of durability. The assembly brought together Germany's Osram, the Netherlands' Philips, France's Compagnie des Lampes, Hungary's Tungsram, the United Kingdom's Associated Electrical Industries, Tokyo Electric, and International General Electric, the foreign division of America's General Electric. Together, they established a Swiss corporation titled Phoebus S.A. Compagnie Industrielle pour le Développement de l'Éclairage, creating one of the most organized and far-reaching cartels in modern industrial history.
Standardizing the 1,000-Hour Filament
While the Phoebus agreement formally carved up national territories and set production quotas to suppress price competition, its central technical initiative focused on the filament itself. The cartel decreed that the rated life of standard household incandescent bulbs must be uniformly capped at exactly 1,000 hours. This was not a aspirational guideline; it was an enforceable production mandate that required factories to fundamentally re-engineer their products to burn out faster.