That's happened with every other lighting technology

It wasn't until 1910 - almost 30 years later - that using light bulbs became cheaper than gas.

"That's happened with every other lighting technology," said DiLaura. "It's been introduced, it's very expensive, and you simply wait enough and long enough, and the price comes down."

Which is where light bulb manufacturers are right now - having to change the public mind-set from the $1.99 disposable idea of lighting to the $25-a-bulb light that's more like an appliance.

"You know, you might install a light bulb in your foyer when your kids are born, and that light bulb will still be in there working, no problems, when the kids go off to college. That's a totally different way to think about lighting," said Ed Crawford, who heads the North American Lighting Division at Philips, the world's largest lighting company.

Like the rest of us, he watched the first jump from incandescents to energy-efficient bulbs with a bit of a cringe.

"Some of the early compact florescent products, they were not ready for prime time," Crawford said. "They buzzed, they had lousy color, they made everything kind of grey-ish, green."

Edison's glowing filament gave off nearly every color of the rainbow, especially reds and yellows. Duplicating it isn't easy.

Too much of any one color is obviously uncomfortable, says Philips' Daniel Blitzer, whether its blue or vivid green.

"We lose our sense of humanity," said Blitzer. "In fact, we go vaguely reptilian."

But perhaps the most important is red. Too much is Martian, but for humans not enough red can be disastrous.

Blitzer demonstrated in on Lee's hands: "If you have no red light, nothing bounces off the red pigments - it only bounces off the blue of your veins, and that looks eerie."

"Awful!" said Cowan.

The answer for Philips was a bulb that just won a $10 million prize from the Department of Energy. While it may look like those orange bug lights of old, this is an LED Philips says all but replicates the warm glow of the incandescent.

It does everything consumers are used to in a bulb, except it uses 9 watts instead of 60 watts.

"The guts of it have to be wildly different," said Cowan.

"The guts are completely different," said Crawford, showing off the LEDs inside.

And when he flipped the switch ... the blue LED and lens assembly emitted a warm white light. "It really is remarkable, it's almost like a magic trick," said Crawford.

But it still has its critics - Howard Brandston for one. He knows a little something about light. He was the engineer who made Lady Liberty shine in just the right way.

He took us out to his garage where he set up an experiment.

A candle, he says, gives off a nicely rounded curve of light, with a lot of yellows and a lot of reds.

The old fashioned 60 watt incandescent is almost identical.