Short History of the Invention of the Incandescent Light Bulb

A Short History of the Invention of the Incandescent Light Bulb

The quest for artificial light dates back to when man first learned to control fire.  Even the Greeks experimented with static electricity.  In 1710, British scientist Francis Hauksbee used static electricity to produce a glow in a hollow glass globe exhausted of its air.  By 1808, the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy attached two pieces of coal to a 2,000-cell battery to produce a four-inch arc of light.  Michael Faraday, working in Britain, and American Joseph Henry independently discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction in 1831, leading to the development of the dynamo as a source of electric power.

Many experimenters and scientists were devoting resources to the capture of light long before 1879.  In a sense, Thomas Edison’s discovery wasn’t entirely created in a vacuum.  Arc lamps were the first to enjoy widespread use, but were only appropriate for street lighting, sports fields, and other large-area illumination.

By the 1870’s there was an informal inventors’ race for a practical application of incandescent technology.  Among the players, Moses G. Farmer, a New England inventor was seeking a more compact device.  He was using a strip of platinum clamped to a battery to light a room.  In 1859, he used his home as a demonstration of electric lighting. 

Englishman Joseph W. Swan developed a lamp in 1860 using carbonized paper as a filament.  Hiram S Maxim, a U.S. developer of machinery and gun models, was moving away from his work on arc lamps toward incandescent lighting.  St. George Lane-Fox, and English inventor also contributed to the technology.  William S. Sawyer, working with Albon Man, developed a wide variety of lamps.  Edison, who only began his experiments in lighting in 1877, saw the value of developing a complete incandescent lighting system – an efficient arrangement of power generation, wiring, switches and the lamp itself.

Edison applied for his first lighting patent in October 1879 for a lamp using a platinum filament.  As he continued his search for a lighting system, he re-built the dynamo to reach 90 percent efficiency (previously 50 percent was optimum), which produced 110 volts, higher than the voltage used by other inventors.  During 1879, Edison began experiments on a variety of carbonized filaments.  He discovered that gases were given off by the filaments during operation thus destroying the vacuum in the bulb.  This shortened the duration the filament would remain illuminated.  Once he resolved this phenomenon, the way was paved toward success.  In a demonstration on October 19, 1879 Edison turned on the current and his lamp began to glow.  It continued glowing for 40 hours.  (Other inventors were still producing lamps that glowed for only a few minutes.)  The date usually given as the time of invention of this first lamp was October 21, when the test was completed.

Public announcement of the invention appeared on December 21, 1879 on the front page of the New York Herald.  A public demonstration was held at Edison’s Menlo Park, N.J. laboratory on New Year’s Eve.

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