Light Bulbs Stamped Engraved and Tattooed!

Update Oct 27: Edit error left out the bottom part of the content

 free-clipart.net

Returning to the ongoing series of memorial/tribute type posts on the blog,
there are other ways of commemorating light bulb images...

To begin with, already posted last year, repeated for completeness:
Satire from the German blog Otitis Media di Monaco (also see the light bulb condom post), with a look at his stamp collection in a GDR or for that matter EUSSR or a Soviet EUnion mode...

GDR CFL stamp series
Contrary to popular belief, the state-planned socialist economy of communist Eastern Germany is not dead; instead, the EU in Brussels is issuing electric policies and spreading propaganda lies that are strangely reminiscent of the days of Nicolaie Ceausescu and Enver Hodscha [Hoxha].


No wonder that the old East German stamps just got an upgrade!

Beautiful european mercury poison mushroom of the novel compact fluorescent kind.
Experts may recognize the bulb design, it’s “made in Eastern Germany”.

Here, ever optimistic East German youths are shown celebrating 55 years of Socialist East Germany just a few years ago – and the proud new sign of centralist European planning and energy micromanagement bureaucracy: the compact fluorescent bulb!

Last, but not least, catch a glimpse of the beauty of Communist single party rule that inspired the well known con(servation) artist Andris Piebalgs, better known as the EU’s Energy Commissioner, to paint such a heroic eurocratic light bulb change brigadier…

Candle power... better than some modern alternatives? ;-)
From Helmut Höge's Taz.de article....

Edison remembered... old unsurprising and new surprising sources...

 coinandstampgallery.com

 ebay.com

British Maritime Energy... hardly sunk by powering the humble incandescent!!

 123rf.com

... while in future remembering the CFL by burying it ? ;-)

 greg groesch  washingtontimes.com

The Zazzle.com site has creative options...

including on metal....

...and how about on skin for real permanence? ;-)
A memorial type tattoo..."Mom I love you as much as I love incandescent light bulbs"

 tattoostime.com

"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

Mock Memorials... Tombstones

See the previous post.
To start with then, tongue-in-cheek memorial activity was included in the otherwise also serious German Light Bulb Ban Memorial 2010 "Das grösste Birnendenkmal Deutschlands", Germany's biggest light bulb memorial, as posted on before (a 2012 follow up was planned, but seemingly not taking place).
As seen it had several components, including "trash" video, people's stories about the bulb, and many amusing images...

source  birnendenkmal.de

"banning the protester against banning the bulb"

source  birnendenkmal.de

Related,
perhaps predictably, various tombstone/gravestone images are also appearing...

As it happens, the above is from a good recent September 2012 article "Incandescent ban evokes nanny state" on ECN by technical editor Jason Lomberg, finishing

....An acute manifestation of the nanny state has slipped in the back door.
The incandescent ban cannot and should not be allowed to stand.
Should the federal government facilitate adoption of newer technologies by legislating older ones from existence? Or should consumers have a say in the matter?

Meanwhile, Icelandic lighting designer Kristjan Kristjansson also made imaginative use of the idea, promoting a memorial installation (some photos from which on Facebook)...

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]