"You Buy its little Brother for a Dime": The Original Edison Light Bulb Memorial

Continuing on the ongoing "memorial" theme, as per recent posts, how about the memorial to the man himself: the incandescent bulb also being known as the Edison bulb at least in America.

1941 Corning Glass on its in involvement in the Edison Memorial Bulb
"You buy its little Brother for a Dime"
Posting large image to allow text to be read...can also be clicked on for larger version in separate window.

source  amazon

.... having been announced in the local press, February 1938

source  modernmechanix

The Edison Memorial Tower that displays this giant bulb is in the Menlo Park Museum of what is now Edison, New Jersey.
Formerly known as the Raritan Township, after the name change proposal came a vote on November 2, 1954, which was close but the name change to Edison Township was selected by a small majority....


More on the Menlo Park Museum website:

Thomas Edison was an unknown young inventor when he moved his experimental facilities to the tiny village of Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. Then, in a six-year burst of astonishing creativity, he patented approximately 400 inventions, and he revolutionized the process of invention itself. Known around the world as the Wizard of Menlo Park, Edison made himself and Menlo Park famous, and to this day, both names are synonymous with the spirit of invention.

More than any other inventor in history, Thomas Edison is responsible for the technologies that make modern life modern. By the time of his death in 1931, he held 1,093 patents covering the creation or refinements of devices in telegraphy and telephony, electric power generation and lighting, sound recording, motion pictures, storage batteries, and mining and cement technology.

However, his most important invention was one that couldn't be patented: the process of modern invention itself. By applying the principles of mass production to the 19th-century model of the solitary inventor, Edison created a process in which skilled scientists, machinists, designers, and others collaborated at a single facility to research, develop, and manufacture new technologies.

On the memorial tower, with the light bulb... extracts from a website page
(images here from the site unless stated)

Two memorial tablets and two towers have been erected since 1925, the second of which is the iconic Thomas Alva Edison Memorial Tower, built in 1937. Topped by an enormous light bulb, the Art Deco Tower has quite literally been a beacon for the community for decades, and every year on the Sunday afternoon before Edison’s birthday, on February 11, members of Menlo Park’s volunteer fire department lay a wreath at its base.

(Designers) Massena and duPont chose the Art Deco style for the Tower shaft, which tapers upward to the monumental replica of Edison's first practical incandescent bulb. The effect is to focus attention upward to the light at the top, as well as enhance the sense of height and monumentality. A brochure, published in 1938, the year of completion and dedication of the Tower, contains the following description:

In designing and selecting materials to be used in the construction of the Tower, great care was taken to use masses and lines which should be as effective in sunlight as at night in the rays of the floodlights. The effect retains the monumental bulb as the main feature of the Tower. A group of eight buttresses rising from the ground to the bulb emphasizes its dominant importance and catch the beams from the floodlights concealed at the top of the dark columns.

A further comment, as from the Ledhut.co.uk blog post Dec 2011, slightly edited:

The largest light bulb in the world can be found atop the Thomas Edison Memorial Tower in Edison, USA. Built in 1937, the light bulb weighs a staggering eight tons
The tower and the Menlo Park Museum were dedicated to Edison on February 11th 1938, the date which would have been the inventor’s 91st birthday. The tower is on the site of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, where he and his staff developed the version of the light bulb for which he became famous.
The Thomas Edison Memorial Tower rises a whopping 301’9” and is topped by the 25’1” monumental bulb which is constructed from Pyrex segments.

The light is as seen illuminated at night.
The town of Edison wish to renovate the building, raising the tower to a height exceeding 400’! The project will cost a whopping 25 million dollars! The plan is to also add more historical objects to the museum and to add a visitor centre to the complex.

The park's website menloparkmuseum.org is rather poorly updated, but it seems most if not all changes have been done...

....but?
seems some others are on the way, with a different idea of how to restore and rejuvenate the tower ;-)

mark paciga via  atlantic wire

A probably legal incandescent bulb!

As readers may know, and as covered before eg "UK/EU Distributors Clarify:
Candle, Golf Ball and other Incandescents also to Stay Available", rough service type bulbs are still legal in various jurisdictions, although supposedly now more subject to scrutiny in the EU...

Still, this probably meets any requirement of a legal industrial rough service shockproof incandescent light bulb :-)
Maybe one that remains available for future domestic fittings too?!
(image origin unknown)

 

German Light Bulb Ban Memorial: "Das grösste Birnendenkmal Deutschlands"

"Coming to a place near you soon"


Well, whatever about a 2012 offering - last I heard it was as yet undecided whether it would still take place - there already was a 2010 version. It was mainly organized by Lutz Jahnke and Julia Diehl who were also behind "Europe's smallest" light bulb memorial as previously posted on, the canned bulb.
The website is Birnendenkmal.de, from which most of the information below comes.



Background

The original idea was Projekt 24 of the 2010 Luminale light festival that took place 11-16 April in Lutz Jahnke's home town Offenbach near Frankfurt.
The festival returned in April 2012 (alt link) without the memorial project returning at that time.

As seen from the 2010 press clipping in German below, Frankfurt City Council was at the time involved in extensive campaigns with prizes and rebates that involved trying to get people to switch their lighting.
Similarly, it seems that the incandescent bulb memorial was not meant to honor the bulb, if anything the reverse, from the city council view of it...

... having perhaps focused on the project's own "politically correct" conclusion of its presentation, March 2010 (pdf in German with information and images).

Im besten Falle wird also nicht nur ein großes Gemeinschaftsprojekt zur Luminale entstehen,
sondern auch ein größeres Bewusstsein für einen nachhaltigeren Umgang mit Energie.

"At best, therefore, not only a great community project for the Luminale,
but also a greater awareness for a sustainable use of energy."

... if so, understandable since they needed a permit for it, as per the news article below.
In any case, as the presentation also said, it was meant to provoke thought, and took on a tributory meaning in development, also seen from the story of the "small memorial" project that succeded it and that it inspired.



Undated article from around the same time






Followed by a Frankfurter Rundschau article by Angelika Ohliger 7 April 2010, a week before the event start, with further information:
[or see Google translated English version]

It involved several collecting places for spent bulbs, also in Frankfurt and Aachen... they were as seen originally hoping for 15 000 bulbs.




The Project Aspects

People were invited to upload photos and stories, as seen on this wall.

There were also plans to have a floating bulb balloon of some sort, though that does not seem to have happened.

Also, a "trash video" was made involving a bulb character, and photos also taken of him running around...

The bulbs themselves were assembled as ice mountains or pyramids...


From the Metermorphosen website, below:
[or see Google translated English version]

Epilogue

As can be imagined, there were several participants helping to bring it all about,
the main ones being Lutz Jahnke and Julia Diehl pictured below 1st and 3rd from the right respectively.

The "credit roll" according to the organizers themselves... left here in the German original, seems more fitting, and it's self-explanatory in the main...

Lutz Jahnke – Initiator, Organisation, Konzept und Gestaltung
Julia Diehl – Initiator, Konzept und Text
Ulrike Bellmann – Organisation
Michael Schumann – Programmierung
Emilia Neumann – Birnensammelstellen
Eva Becker – Filme
Teresa Habild – Illustration, Birnenquiz
Leonie Langenstein – „fliegende Birne“
Frank Flaskämper – Denkmal-Konstruktion
Claudia Jahnke – Denkmal-Architektur
sternmorgenstern – Denkmal-Architektur
Oliver Schick – Modellbau
[and Ariane Mayer – Denkmal-Konstruktion]

Canned Heat "Das kleinste Birnendenkmal Europas"

No, this is not about these guys...






Rather about something with a less blue-sy content...

or if you will...

[Seemingly the same idea has occurred to different creators...
The ones covered here claim to be first and to have been copied, as per comment! Some more about the "Lichtkonserve" canning of light bulbs will follow.
Update: See "Whatever You Can, We Can Too"...]


The Heatball satirical objection to the bulb ban has been well covered in previous posts, and is still ongoing through all the legal challenges and appeals.
Meanwhile another satirical artistic venture has been going on for some years, although recently halted, again for legal reasons (the ones without humor are the German judges, but in that profession they are not alone!).
This is about the Frankfurt based Canned Heat venture, or rather Kultur-Reserve, culture reserve, by the Metermorphosen company: a word play on "metamorphosis",
as they focus on creating new artistic meaning out of everyday objects.


Their own description of their activities: Google translation, somewhat corrected...

MeterMorphosen stands, as already seen in the name, for transformed everyday objects.
We develop our own product ideas, check their feasibility, and then produce them with the most suitable materials. The transformations are more than just a gimmick, they give the items a palpable new dimension. Thus a yardstick measure of space became a measure of time and space. Or from the linoleum floor a memory card game was made, with original artwork from the 1920s. And from the world's most widely used eating utensils a small collection of poems, with which you can combine the sensuality of eating with the sensuality of poetry.
Important for MeterMorphosen is a playfully educative approach, the products must have a certain esprit, the abstract becoming sensually comprehensible. By such lateral thinking our products may succeed to make complex inter-relations more clear and able to be seen in a new way.

They also have an English language presentation of themselves...




While the canned bulb manufacture and sales have been organized by publisher Florian Koch and partners, the concept and also apparently the original manufacture was by artist Lutz Jahnke in Offenbach.

There seem to be slightly conflicting accounts about it, but the story seems to go something like this...
During the lighting festival Luminale in Offenbach April 2010, Lutz Jahnke and his partner Julia Diehl organized a big "Birnen Denkmal" light bulb memorial to incandescent light bulbs:
Public collections of spent bulbs took place and mounds of them were artistically arranged by Lutz, Julia and others.
Seemingly now in 2012 there are plans for some kind of repeat offering - the original idea and further development will be covered in a following blog post.

Having got access to sausage making /canning machines the idea then came to Jahnke
about extending the memorial idea... "after the biggest light bulb memorial in Germany, the smallest light bulb memorial in Europe!".
A "culture reserve", not really supposed to be opened, an artistically produced memory of today's bulbs for the future.

Lutz had several lines of thought behind it...
Birne = Pear = what former German leader Chancellor Kohl was called, also the classic bulb in cartoons being synonymous with a "bright idea", also historically the bulb reaching back a long time, given the action as a kind of memorial, while also symbolizing a resistance to government interference in personal freedom, the "last ration" aspect of putting it in a can, as in survival shelters...

So he started putting the bulbs into cans, somewhere along the line getting
help with the manufacture and distribution by the Metamorphoses company in Frankfurt.


Op-Online 10/4/2012 article about artist Lutz and the canned bulb development:
[or see Google translated English version]

The presentation of it as a product for sale:
[or see Google translated English version]

The site however also now warns
"The culture reserve product is until further notice not deliverable and can not be ordered from the online shop".....



The canned bulbs become banned

In recent months, the venture has again got media coverage in Germany.
14th July article from the Frankfurter Runsdschau paper, translated.

A fuller account from the 25th July, 2012, also from artist Lutz Jahnke's point of view
op-online website, translated.

As can be seen, the sale is now forbidden under threat of a 2000 Euro fine for a first offence (somewhat like drug dealing), the argument being that such 60W bulbs were banned from manufacture Sep 2011.
Lutz and company manager Koch - reasonably enough - feel they were really only packaging and distruibuting already made bulbs. The bulbs came first from German, then from French manufacturers, before the ban.
In the EU, like in the USA, the legislation is of not allowing further manufacture within the jurisdiction, or import from outside, of the light bulbs - neither of which apply here.
Florian Koch said that they may yet beat the new deadline of 1 Sep 2012 for 40W bulbs by filling cans with them instead... however, to date this seems not to have occured.

Videos:
Recent videos carry the same tale about the ban on the sale.
For example, July 24 2012, on the RTL Hessen site: mp4 file, featuring Florian Koch.

Another video from July, from the 25 minute point, featuring Lutz Jahnke, also describing how he got the idea after getting hold of a sausage machine.



Lutz's concluding thoughts from his Jahnke design site

01 september 2012:
glühbirnen — europaweit verboten
»nichts bewegt die welt mehr als licht — deshalb haben wir ihm ein denkmal für alle nostalgiger & ein mahnmal für alle die immer noch wahllos energie verschwenden, gewidmet.
die »kultur reserve« ist die antwort auf die faulen früchte der eurokratie. ein zeitgenössiches kunstwerk, das sie unbedingt in ihren besitz bringen müssen.«

01 september 2012:
incandescent bulbs - banned throughout europe
"nothing moves the world more than light - that's why we dedicated to it a monument for all with nostalgia and a memorial for all those who still (choose to) indiscriminately waste energy.
The "cultural reserve" is the answer to the bad fruits of the eurocracy, a contemporary artwork that they absolutely have to bring into their possession."