Why the end of the lightbulb is a dark day for us all

Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian, Monday 5 January 2009

Let its cool glass bottom caress your palm. Feels good, doesn't it? Now wrap your fingers around its hips and push the head firmly into the fixture. Then turn it anti-clockwise (gently, mind) until you can turn no more (or was it clockwise?). If you've got a bayonet cap, ignore the last sentence and consult a qualified electrician.
Now, because you didn't turn off the power (you really should have), feel cool glass turn warm, become hot, and then really hurt. Even now the argon in the bulb is minimising energy evaporation from the gorgeous glow of tungsten filament. And - look! - the light approximates a continuous spectrum. Now remove your burning hand.
Finally, you feel my pain. This month, 75W and 100W bulbs begin to disappear from sale as we switch to environmentally friendly, but dimmer, colder, uglier, often more expensive, eco-bulbs. From Bantry Bay to Bucharest, European ceilings today bear witness to a mass hanging signifying the end of the incandescent bulb. One by one those doomed lights will, as Churchill foresaw (he was actually on about something else), go off all over Europe.
Meanwhile, eco-triumphalists will witter smugly about how the ban will save - what was it again? - 30m tonnes of CO2 yearly, which is nearly half the 2006 greenhouse emissions of Sweden. How dreary. Personally, I don't care about either half of Sweden's 2006 greenhouse emissions.
I've gone too far, haven't I? But then, as Ingo Maurer, the German designer of light installations once said, the lightbulb is "the perfect union of technology and poetry". Like steam trains and space hoppers (which were, unreliable researchers tell me, modelled on lightbulbs), these pendulous pear-like fruits of the Industrial Revolution must die as ugly design extends its endless remit.
Two questions remain. How many scientists did it take to invent a lightbulb? Only one, you reply, namely Thomas Edison. Yeah? What about the 19th-century Britons, such as Joseph Wilson Swan who devised the carbon fibre filament or Sir Humphry Davy who experimented with platinum filaments and carbon arc lamps? Researchers estimate that 22 scientists were involved in the lightbulb's evolution.
What will future cartoonists draw above thinkers' heads to show they've had a eureka moment? No idea. I wonder what cartoonists used before lightbulbs were invented. Did they show Archimedes running naked from his bath above a thinker's hyperactive cranium? It seems unlikely. We'll have to invent something new.