Edison didn't invent, but had a bright idea about light bulbs
Thomas Edison is credited with inventing many things, including the light bulb. But, in fact, Edison did not invent the bulb, though he did improve on a bulb in his lab in Menlo Park, N.J, that is essentially the same as being used today. Edison was working off nearly 70 years of research on light bulbs.
Here is a brief history of the incandescent light bulb that will slowly be dimmed into the history books.
In 1809, an English chemist, Humphrey Davy, is credited with inventing the first electric light. Davy connected two wires to a battery and attached a charcoal strip between the ends of the wires, creating an incandescent light and thus the first arc lamp.
In 1820, Warren De la Rue attempted to make the first incandescent light bulb. He enclosed a platinum coil in an evacuated tube and passed an electric current through it. While it worked, the cost of using platinum made it impossible for commercial use.
In 1835, James Bowman Lindsay created a prototype light bulb.
In 1850, Edward Shepard invented an electrical incandescent lamp using a charcoal filament. That same year, Joseph Wilson Swan used carbonized paper filaments.
In 1854, German watchmaker Henrich Gobel invented the first true light bulb, using carbonized bamboo filament inside a glass bulb.
In 1875, German chemist Hermann Sprengel developed the mercury vacuum pump, making it possible to create a practical electric light bulb. That same year, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans patented a light bulb.
In 1878, English physicist Sir. Joseph Wilson Swan invented a bulb that lasted 13.5 hours.
In 1879, Edison invented a carbon filament that burned for 40 hours in an oxygenless bulb. In that year, he purchased the patent from Woodward and Evans.
In 1880, Edison improved the bulb until it could last for more than 1,200 hours using a bamboo-derived filament.
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Photo of the Week by Todd Ponath: ROCKIN' IT - Fred Eide, left, and his daughter Ashley, of Eide Painting and Sandblasting, use spray guns to paint the individual rock shapes on the underside of the I-94 overpass at Highway P in Oconomowoc Wednesday, May 16. Each "rock" is painted individually and then speckled with black paint to make it look like granite.
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