Today Google Doodle marks the 164th Birthday of Thomas Edison. On the occasion of Thomas Edison 164th Birthday the Google logo portrays some of the famous inventions of the scientist. This includes phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.
The world's longest lasting light bulb is the Centennial Light located at 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California. It is maintained by the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department. The fire department claims that the bulb is at least 109 years old and has only been turned off a handful of times. The bulb has been noted by The Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, and General Electric as being the world's longest-lasting light bulb.
While it might seem astonishing that so many longest-lasting light bulbs have been so infrequently turned off, this is the precise reason for their longevity. Most of the wear and tear that leads to burnouts in incandescent light bulbs is caused by turning them on and off, not by burning them. Each time the bulb is turned on and off, the filament is heated and cooled. This causes the material of the filament to expand and contract, in turn causing tiny stress cracks to develop. The more the light is turned on and off, the larger these cracks grow, until eventually the filament breaks at some point, causing the light to burn out.
Thomas Edison designed a bulb that was supposed to last forever, called the Eternal Light, and turned it on on October 22, 1929. The bulb is located in the Memorial Tower at the Edison Memorial Museum in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The tower fell down in 1937, but the bulb's power was supposedly uninterrupted, according to General Electric, and continued to burn while a second tower was constructed. According to museum curator Jack Stanley, the bulb is fake, consisting of a hollow bulb illuminated by a series of automobile headlights mounted in the display's base
