WHEN was the last time you had an electrical applicance or electronics conk out on you? Or when did you last replace a lightbulb?

About 23 years ago, I visited my uncle, an army officer who was living in his allocated official residence whose design seemed to pre-date the 1960s. The interesting part was the utility-store room upstairs of the two-storey bungalow. Specifically, it was the 30 or 40-watt (W) lightbulb in the tiny closet space; it was very old and had never burnt out throughout my uncle’s stay there.

By design, it looked like a simple incandescent bulb with the familiar, faded GE logo stamped on and seemed like it was from a 1960s movie.

“It’s been there even before we moved in,” I remember my uncle saying.

This simply amazed me, knowing full well that a bulb normally would not last that long in my home. A regular incandescent, carbon-filament lightbulb normally lasts about 750 to 1,000 hours of usage.

That’s why I was so ecstatic to learn about another lightbulb that could continuously last for over

100 years! The long-lasting bulb is the Livermore Centennial Light, which was first installed at a fire department hose cart house in California in 1901. Donated to the fire department by Dennis Bernal, owner of Livermore Power and Light Co, it was later moved to the main firehouse. Two years later, it was moved to a new station and later survived the renovation of the firehouse in 1937, where it was turned off for a week.

For the first 75 years, it was connected directly to the American standard 110-volt (V) power line. No backup generator was used for fear of a power surge.

In 1976, it was finally moved with a full police and fire truck escort to Fire Station 6 in Livermore, California. It was hooked up to a separate 120V power source by a city electrician. It has been kept on ever since.

It baffles me how the 4W, “improved incandescent” lamp with hand-blown bulb and carbon filament, invented by Adolphe A. Chaillet, made by the now-defunct Shelby Electric Co, could have survived for so long. It has been theorised that the secret lies in its low wattage and it being continuously left on.

Whatever the reason, there’s a lesson here: We need to see what we really need.

A case in point is associated with IT developments today: heat generation and the environment. Data centres eat up a lot of energy and eventually produce a lot of heat. Both are bad for the environment.

The solution: Go multi-core.

In the past, the common idea was for more performance, you needed more clock speed, which, in turn, would increase production heat. But by having multiple cores, performance can be increased without increasing clock speed. So, less energy will be needed to cool the data centre processors.

Less energy used also means less strain and wear on components. This, just like the Livermore Centennial Bulb, could mean computers would last longer – something that we dream about when our expensive desktop or laptop computer dies out.