Broken Bulb Quotes & Sayings

If we were going to determine what was broken in the radios, we needed a power source. With no electricity, this meant batteries. [ ... ] we'd walk to the trading center and look for used cells that had been tossed in the waste bins. [ ... ]
First we'd test the battery to see if any juice was left in it. We'd attach two wires to the positive and negative ends and connect them to a torch bulb. The brighter the bulb, the stronger the battery. Next we'd flatten the Shake Shake carton and roll it into a tube, then stack the batteries inside, making sure the positives and negatives faced in the same direction. Then we'd run wires from each end of the stack to the positive and negative heads inside the radio, where the batteries normally go. Together, this stack of dead batteries usually contained enough juice to power a radio. — William Kamkwamba

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken
light-bulb?" goes the old Lojban joke. "Two: one to decide
what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb
emits broken light. — Arika Okrent

... you know, sometimes an electric lightbulb goes out all of a sudden. Fizzles, you say. And this burned-out bulb, if you shake it, it flashes again and it'll burn a little longer. Inside the bulb it's a disaster. The wolfram filaments are breaking up, and when the fragments touch, life returns to the bulb. A brief, unnatural, undeniably doomed life - a fever, a too-bright incandescence, a flash. The comes the darkness, life never returns, and in the darkness the dead, incinerated filaments are just going to rattle around. Are you following me? But the brief flash is magnificent!
"I want to shake ...
"I want to shake the heart of a fizzled era. The lightbulb of the heart, so that the broken pieces touch ...
" ... and produce a beautiful, momentary flash ... — Yury Olesha

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn't affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement ... — Jonathan Franzen

All the misfits of the world--the too fat and too lean, the too tall and the too short, the jerk, the drip, the half-wit and the spastic, the harelip and the gimp. All the broken, the doomed, the drunk and the disillusioned--herding together for a little human warmth, where a one-room kitchenette is an apartment and the naked electric bulb hangs suspended from the ceiling like an exposed nerve — Lawrence Lipton

I found my flashlight where I'd dropped it on the bricks, but the bulb had broken. Lockwood's was gone, and George's seemed dimmer than before.
'Save it,' Lockwood said. He brought out candles and distributed them between us; when lit, their flames were mustard-yellow, tall, and strong. 'They'll be a good indicator of psychic build-up, too,' he said. 'Keep your eye on them.'
'Shame we can't use caged cats, like Tom Rotwell did,' George remarked. 'They're the most sensitive indicator of all, apparently - *if* you can stand the yowling. — Jonathan Stroud