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Estelle Sauvage's Easy-Bake 'Kettle' Powered By a Light Bulb

by Matthew Zuras on September 5, 2010 at 09:01 AM

estelle sauve's kettle
Designer Estelle Sauvage decided to respond to the European Union's ban on incandescent light bulbs by trying to craft a lasting legacy for the filament as it steadily marches toward the grave, "demonized by ecology." Sauvage's Kettle isn't much more than an Easy-Bake oven, relying on a single incandescent bulb in its base to warm the water in the pot through its lost radiant heat. Considering that standard incandescents expel over 90-percent of their electricity through heat, it's no wonder they've been nixed.

While the kettle doesn't ever reach a boil, it does climb up to between 185 and 194-degrees Fahrenheit, "an ideal temperature for tea," according to Sauvage. (Maybe that may be true for whites, greens and oolongs, black and herbal teas like a nigh-rolling 210-degrees.) The kettle is a beautiful and minimal design-art object, paying "a kind of tribute, staging the bulb, and its death." But is it practical? All those thin layers of glass barely protecting the water and electrical elements make it seem like a recipe for electrocution if the pot's set down too hard. And so the incandescent bulb remains dangerous, even in its final act.

Tags: easy-bake oven, Easy-bakeOven, Estelle Sauvage, EstelleSauvage, incandescent, incandescent bulbs, IncandescentBulbs, kettle, radiant heat, RadiantHeat, tea, tea kettle, TeaKettle, top

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