http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43483004/ns/technology_and_science-science/?GT1=43001

They sure don't make things like they used to. Except for the intermittent power outages and the 20ish minutes that this bulb was transferred from one fire station to another (with a police escort, no less o.O), this bulb has been running non stop for 110 years.

And if you get epically bored, you can watch it via here: http://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htm

It says it updates every 10 seconds, but according to the clock, it goes every 30 seconds.

I heard about this a while ago and found it vaguely interesting.

This just popped up in Windows Live's news feed, I thought it was intriguing enough to warrant a post. :p

I saw it too, it was pretty awesome.
"They don't build them like they used to"

It's actually fairly easy to make incandescent lamps last practically forever: by greatly under-driving them. Even a mild drop in voltage tends to substantially lengthen life span. Doing this comes at a huge penalty, however: the already miserable electricity-to-light efficiency of the filament becomes even worse, to the point of making this strategy uneconomical.

Wow, that's really cool.

Yeah, it's such a shame our profit-oriented capitalistic society won't let us build things like this anymore...

Even if you did, though, you'd necessarily (due simply to the physics principles involved) end up paying some orders of magnitude more on energy costs to get the desired amount of light with such long-lasting filaments than you would save on not having to buy new light bulbs. It's not all a conspiracy to make you buy more bulbs; there is some economic sense involved.