Vintage Consumer Reports: Fluorescent lighting

"Fluorescent lighting has a sufficient surplus of virtues to make any advertising man delirious with its exploitation possibilities."—Consumer Reports, January 1941

Millions of Americans were introduced to fluorescent lighting at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. Soon thereafter, our engineers tested fluorescent bulbs and found that this newfangled type of lighting was superior to incandescents and, despite its higher price—a 15-watt fluorescent tube cost 95 cents and produced comparable light output to a 10-cent 60-watt incandesecent—offered consumers considerable long-term savings since fluorescent bulbs used less electricity and lasted much longer.

That 1941 report proves that what's old is new. (Download a PDF of the article: Consumer Reports_Fluorescent 1941.pdf.) As we've found over the last year and a half during our tests of Energy Star-qualified compact fluorescent lightbulbs, each CFL you install as a replacement for an incandescent bulb will trim your electric bill by at least $30 over its life even though it costs more than an incandescent with comparable light output. We've heard from readers who say their CFLs burned out to soon, yet nearly every bulb we've tested has lasted at least 3,000 hours—triple the typical life of an incandescent—and some much longer than that. (Read our latest testing update.)

We weren't concerned about reducing greenhouse gases in 1941 but today know that energy-sipping CFLs can help substantially reduce carbon-dioxide and mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. (You can find out which power sources provide electricity to your home by reading "Uncover the Source of Your Power.") That environmental upside is not greenwashing but rather another reason to replace your incandescent bulbs with CFLs.—Kimberly Janeway

Essential reading: Read our advice on how to handle a broken CFL and watch our video (above). And stay up on the next wave of illuminations technology, solid-state lighting.