Incandescent light bulbs history.
Let me tell something about the life of this so needed thing, the clasic light bulb.
"Who invented the incandescent lamp?". Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. Edison's Light Bulb/Lamp version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance lamp.
Thomas Hughes, another big historian, has attributed Edison's success because he invented an integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting."
Edison patented a system for electricity distribution in 1880, which was essential to capitalize on the invention of the electric lamp. On December 17, 1880, Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company. The company established the first investor-owned electric utility in 1882 on Pearl Street Station, New York City. It was on September 4, 1882, that Edison switched on his Pearl Street generating station's electrical power distribution system, which provided 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan. Earlier in the year, in January 1882 he had switched on the first steam generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London. The DC supply system provided electricity supplies to street lamps and several private dwellings within a short distance of the station. On January 19, 1883, the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey.
Between 1802 and 1880 there was a big pre-comercial research made by many reasearchers. All of this research ended with no long term result that until Thomas Edison inveted the "long lasting filament" which was in fact a carbonized bamboo filament that could last over 1200 hours.
In 1878, Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. It was during this time that he said: "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles." So with the help of Thomas Edison and Joseph Wilson Swan (1828–1914), a British physicist and chemist, in 1881, the Savoy Theatre became the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electric lights.In the 1890s, the Austrian inventor Carl Auer von Welsbach worked on metal-filament mantles, first with platinum wiring, and then osmium, and produced an operative version of the light lamp in 1898. In 1898 he patented the osmium lamp and started marketing it in 1902, the first commercial metal filament incandescent lamp.
In 1913 Irving Langmuir found that filling a lamp with inert gas instead of a vacuum resulted in twice the luminous efficacy and reduction of bulb blackening. In 1924, Marvin Pipkin, an American chemist, patented a process for frosting the inside of lamp bulbs without weakening them, and in 1947 he patented a process for coating the inside of lamps with silica.
Here you can see some movies with an old carbon filament lamp.
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