History of Light bulbs

History of Light bulbs: The History of the Light Bulb – An Electric Dawn

Would it surprise you to know that Thomas Alva Edison did not, in fact, invent the light bulb in 1879? While Edison was certainly responsible for turning the idea of the light bulb into a commercially successful working invention, but the patent he held for the invention itself was not his own original design. Man-made electric lighting actually had its beginnings about seventy years prior, when an English chemist named Humphrey Davy (who was also the man responsible for creating the Davy Lamp, a safety lamp for miners) invented the arc light. This electrical prototype worked through the connection of two wires to a battery, the opposite ends of which were attached to a strip of charcoal. This caused the charcoal, a form of carbon, to become electrically charged and emit a glow surrounded by arcs of electricity.

In 1820, Warren De La Rue enhanced this idea by placing a platinum coil into an empty tube and allowing an electrical current to pass through it: the world’s very first functioning light bulb. While De La Rue’s invention worked and produced ample amounts of light, its costly assembly prevented it from becoming a practical device.

James Prescott Joule’s theory that a resistant conductor would become luminous if an electric current was passed through it sparked the search for a working light bulb filament. Many scientists around the world worked for years on discovering such a filament, but considerations such as safety, cost-effectiveness, and practicality presented numerous obstacles. Finally, in 1860, Joseph Wilson Swan created a carbonized filament in a partial vacuum for an incandescent lamp. Swan’s lamp was capable of remaining lit for thirteen and a half hours, a record Edison would eventually beat with a modified lamp lasting just under fifteen hours. Edison purchased Swan’s patent and continued to improve upon it until he had created a bamboo fiber filament capable of burning for anywhere between 1200-1500 hours.