☞Let There be Light!

☞Let There be Light!

☞Today in History -- According to traditional American public-school pædagoguery, on today’s date 143 years ago, Wednesday, October 22, 1879, famous American inventor & businessman Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1941) invented the electric incandescent light bulb -- but did he really? 




☞On today’s date 142 years ago, laboratory technicians working for Thomas A. Edison (who was not above occasionally taking credit for other people’s inventions) successfully tested an electric incandescent light bulb that used a filament of carbonized thread which lasted for 13½ hours before burning out -- a notable milestone in the long & rather obscure history of the development of practical electric artificial light. 

“If I didn’t invent the incandescent lamp, I never invented anything.”
 -- Thomas Edison, 1892

☞Here is a brief chronological timeline of some of the historical milestones in the development of the electrical incandescent light bulb:

☞1808 -- English electrochemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) created an incandescent lamp by passing an electrical current through a thin strip of platinum.

☞1835 -- James Bowman Lindsay (1799-1862) demonstrated a constant electric light at a public meeting in Dundee, Scotland. He stated that he could “read a book at a distance of one & a half feet.” He is credited in Challoner et al. with being the inventor of the “Incandescent Light Bulb.”

☞1840 -- British scientist Warren De la Rue (1815-1889) enclosed a platinum coil in an evacuated tube & passed an electric current through it. His lamp design worked, but the high cost of the precious metal platinum made this an impossible invention for wide-spread use.

☞1841 -- Frederick de Moleyns of England was granted the first patent for an incandescent lamp, with a design using platinum wires contained within a vacuum bulb.

☞1845 -- American inventor John W. Starr (1822-1853) acquired a patent for an incandescent light bulb involving the use of carbon filaments. He died shortly after obtaining the patent, & his invention was never produced commercially.

☞1851 -- Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871) publicly demonstrated incandescent light bulbs on his estate in Blois, France. His light bulbs are on permanent display in the museum of the Château de Blois.

☞1854 -- Heinrich Göbel (1818-1893), a German watchmaker, invented what has been called “the first true light bulb.” He used a carbonized bamboo filament placed inside a glass bulb. 

☞1872 -- Russian inventor Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin (1847-1932) invented an incandescent light bulb & obtained a Russian patent. In 1874, he obtained an American patent for his invention. Later he applied for & obtained patents for incandescent lamps using molybdenum & tungsten filaments that were then demonstrated at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris.

☞1874 -- A Canadian patent was filed by a Toronto medical electrician named Henry Woodward & his colleague Mathew Evans. They constructed their electric lamps with different sizes & shapes of carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. Woodward & Evans attempted to commercialize their lamp, but were unsuccessful. They ended up selling their patent to Thomas Edison in 1879.

☞1878 -- Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914), an English physicist, was the first person to invent a practical & longer-lasting electric light bulb (13.5 hours). Swan used a carbon-fiber filament derived from cotton. 

☞1879 -- Thomas Alva Edison’s technicians, after testing a plethora of different substances for filaments, happened by chance upon a type of carbon filament that would burn for forty hours when placed in an oxygenless bulb. The Edison design was evolved from designs for a light bulb partly based upon the 1874 patent that he had purchased from inventors Henry Woodward & Matthew Evans, but it was primarily Joseph Swan’s 1878 light bulb design that was copied & patented by Edison after Swan failed to patent his own invention.

☞1903 -- Willis R. Whitney (1868-1958) invented a filament that would not make the inside of a light bulb turn dark. It was a metal-coated carbon filament (a predecessor to the tungsten filament). 

☞1910 -- William David Coolidge (1873-1975) invented an improved method of making tungsten filaments. The tungsten filament outlasted all other types of filaments & Coolidge made the costs practical.

☞And that, dear Facebook friends, is how Thomas A. Edison single-handedly invented the electric light bulb!

☞The undated photograph depicts famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison with his most famous "invention" -- the incandescent electrical light bulb.

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