Quote:
Originally Posted by emeritus
Rather than seeking to shorten lamp life, the first cartel was established in Germany around 1903 with the objective of allowing the manufacturers to make enough profit to make lamps of good quality. Unlike the US and the UK, where the patentees could impose prices and quality control, there was no effective patent protection for lamps in Germany, resulting in savage price-cutting that resulted in lamps of poor quality and short life. .
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"Cheap lamp-bulbs" were also commonplace in pre-WWII Poland: I remember a distant relative once saying that they had door-to-door sellers of cheap bulbs (and dusters and candles and boxes of matches and bars of soap) in the same way as the beret-wearing Frenchmen cycled around selling onions.