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In Defense of IncandescenceCongress bans beauty as an environmental hazard.

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2008, at 6:20 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

But the appeal of incandescence is not just a matter of romance. I suspect there are also answers to be found in the physics and linguistics of incandescence.

I'd speculate that it has something to do with the different ways light is created by incandescents and fluorescents. Incandescent light is created by heat, by the way an electric current turns a thin metal filament (usually tungsten) red then white hot in a transparent or translucent globe filled with an inert gas that prevents the filament from burning up, allowing it to give off a steady glow.

(That explains the warmth: The fact that incandescence emanates from heat creates warmth, distinguishes it from the cold creepiness of fluorescence.)

Fluorescent light bulbs, on the other hand, are coated inside with chemical material that lights up as energy reaches the tubes. (It's a bit more complicated than this, but that's the general idea.) Fluorescents sometimes appear to flicker because alternating current brings that energy to the bulbs in pulses, rather than steadily. In incandescents, the hot filament stays hot—and therefore bright—despite alternations in current; it can't cool fast enough to dim or flicker.

The new CFLs pulse faster than their ancestors, so the flickering is less perceptible, but at some level, it's still there. CFL manufacturers may be right that the new bulbs are an improvement, but there is still something discontinuous, digital, something chillingly one-and-zero about fluorescence, while incandescent lights offer the reassurance of continuity rather than an alternation of being and nothingness. If I remember correctly, the line from genesis was "Let there be light," not "Let there be flickering."

Yes, it's more metaphorical than scientific, but I'd argue that there's a big difference between light that is essentially switched on and off and light that is a warm continuous glow. There is an argument among philosophers and physicists about the continuity or discontinuity of time, about whether the universe exists continuously or whether the flickering of discrete instants of time simply gives the illusion of continuity, the way the sprocketed discrete frames of a film do. Incandescents give us the illusion, if not the proof, of the continuity of existence.

And then there's the word incandescence itself. It almost embodies, doesn't it, the ascent from ignition to illumination. In-can-Des-cence—the flare-up and settling into warmth is captured by the sound.

Was it an accident that, even in its endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the august New York Times editorial board called Barack Obama "incandescent," a word that's somehow appropriate because, to my mind, he ignites something with his words.

But don't take my word for it. The most poetic defense of the tungsten filament lies in a remarkably imaginative, literally incandescent version of the afterlife found in (surprise!) Nabokov's Pale Fire, a book that derives its title from the reflected glow of moonlight, specifically a line in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: "[T]he moon's an arrant thief,/ and her pale fire she snatches from the sun."

Even those who haven't read Pale Fire—and what's your excuse? It's perhaps the greatest English-language novel of the past century, and it's hilarious—are probably aware that it takes the form of a madman's commentary on a 999-line poem called "Pale Fire." But there's another poem in Pale Fire that's rarely referred to, one that exists unfairly in the pale shadow of the "Pale Fire."

It's a poem about the spirits of the dead inhabiting the tungsten filaments of incandescent bulbs. Seriously!

According to Charles Kinbote, the madly unreliable narrator of Pale Fire, John Shade, the author of the poem "Pale Fire," wrote another, shorter poem called "The Nature of Electricity." It's an incandescent poetic theory of the afterlife, of the fate of dead souls, and it begins like this:

"The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide.
And on my bedside table glows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered, and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.

It's a jest yes, in part, but a gesture too, toward the deathless beauty of incandescent lights and a kind of life—or afterlife—they glow with that no corpse light florescent, however well-disguised, can capture. Because incandescents are about continuity, light after death if not life after death.

Save the incandescent bulb. If only for the sake of the dead souls glowing within.

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
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