A Brief History of the Light Bulb

They say never meet your heroes, which is probably good advice because, by most accounts, Thomas Edison stunk. Literally. He disliked changing his clothes and often went without bathing. He even slept in his laboratory in short bursts.

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One of his associates remarked, “His genius for sleep equaled his genius for invention. He could go to sleep any where (sic), any time, on anything.”

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On the surface, Edison fits the archetype of the “mad scientist,” which is partly why it’s easy for people to credit him with the invention of the light bulb. However, this isn’t true.

A revisionist early history of the light bulb

The events that led to the invention of the light bulb pick up where we left off in our last newsletter, with the gas lamplighters who helped illuminate the bustling cities of Europe and the United States.

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Scientists in the 19th century were eager to develop an electric lamp. The first was the arc lamp, a device invented in 1802, which created light from a high-voltage arc of electricity jumping between two carbon rods. The arc lamp was riddled with limitations. It burned quickly and was scalding hot. It was also too noisy for indoor use, required constant maintenance and put off a harsh brightness.

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So, inventors kept tinkering. By the middle of the century—more than thirty years before Edison entered the scene—the light bulb was invented. In 1840, British chemist Warren de la Rue created a light bulb using a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube. However, the high cost of platinum made it too expensive to commercialize.

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Finding the right filament in a light bulb (the thin wire that produces light when heated by an electric current) posed a challenge. Inventors had to find a durable, long-lasting filament that produced a bright and steady light. It also had to be affordable, which is why scientists tried everything from carbonized paper to plant fibers and even human hair.

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Joseph Swan, a British physicist, spent nearly three decades tinkering with carbon filament bulbs. By the 1870s, he had something that worked. Before Edison filed his patent in 1879, Swan had been conducting public demonstrations of his short-lasting bulb.

Edison, the commercializer of the light bulb

As a relative latecomer, Edison and his team in Menlo Park, New Jersey, made remarkable progress in a short period of time. They tested over 6,000 options for filament, running thousands of experiments before finally settling on a carbonized Japanese bamboo that produced the longest-lasting light.

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“The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments,” he wrote. “I was never myself discouraged, or inclined to be hopeless of success. I cannot say the same for all my associates.”

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The Edison incandescent lamp, patented in 1880, was the first practical light bulb—combining longevity, efficiency and an electrical system to support it. Edison and his team (which included other prominent inventors, like Lewis Latimer and Nikola Tesla for a short time) developed the first electrical meter, the first light bulb screw socket (the ribbed Edison Screw still used today), electric motors and a system of safety fuses.

Herein lies Edison’s greatest contribution: developing a suite of related inventions that made the light bulb workable for everyday use.

A story of persistent refinement

Today, light bulbs are synonymous with sudden revelation, insight or invention (AKA “light bulb moments”). But the history of the light bulb had surprisingly few of these. It is a history defined more by perfecting than inventing, more by the plodding, day-in-day-out work of continuous improvement than those elusive eureka moments.

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It is Edison who said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

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“I never had an idea in my life,” he wrote. “My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside.”

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Since our founding in 1975, we have obsessed over the process of persistent refinement. Every year, our products get a little better, and our craftsmanship improves. While not perfect, we do not allow the fear of failure to impede our progress.

Here is to the next hundred years of persistent refinement.

Behind the Scenes at Idaho Wood Lighting

The Knot: The Domestication of the Bulb

The history of the light bulb is marked by the tension between technology and beauty, between functional illumination and aesthetic warmth.

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The light bulb began as brute force: brightness on demand. The Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, author of the book Treasure Island, disdained the arc lamp for its “ugly blinding glare.” Instead, he preferred the “biddable domesticated stars” of older gaslamps.

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The responsibility of “domesticating” the light bulb still exists today; the light bulb needs to be covered, designed, ensconced, directed. The frontier of our work is no longer to produce light but to shape it—to transform the hostility of a naked bulb into something that is inspired, human and warm.