Who invented the electrical light bulb? Most of us need no time to
say Thomas Alva Edison. Very few amongst us actually know Edison didn’t invent
electrical light or even the light bulb. He did, in fact, experiment widely
with filaments and light bulb construction to help produce one of the first
economically viable light bulbs. The accolade for inventing the first electric
bulb is reserved for English scientist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829).
Here are few main events in the history because of which today's light bulbs glow years:
1809 - Humphry Davy, an English chemist, invented the first electric light. Davy connected
two wires to a battery and attached a charcoal strip between the other ends of
the wires. The charged carbon glowed making the first arc lamp. The
illumination was extremely bright and impractical for residential application.
The original demonstration was more a proof of concept demonstration than
anything else as the arc lamp quickly drained the battery it was attached to.
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| Humphry Davy |
1878 - Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914), an English physicist, was the first person
to invent a practical and longer-lasting electric light bulb (13.5 hours). Swan
used a carbon fiber filament derived from cotton.
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| Joseph Wilson Swan |
1879 - The inventor Thomas Alva Edison (in the USA) experimented with thousands of different filaments
to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting. In 1879,
Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did
not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for
over 1200 hours.
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| Thomas Alva Edison |
1991 - Philips invented a light bulb that lasts
60,000 hours. The bulb uses magnetic induction.
interesting!
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