Who invented the first light bulb?
It’s certainly true that Edison did invent the light bulb (or at least “a” light bulb), but he wasn’t the first. In 1860, an English physicist and electrician, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, produced his first experimental light bulb using carbonized paper as a filament. Unfortunately, Swan didn’t have a strong enough vacuum or sufficiently powerful batteries and his prototype didn’t achieve complete incandescence, so he turned his attentions to other pursuits. Fifteen years later, in 1875, Swan returned to consider the problem of the light bulb and, with the aid of a better vacuum and a carbonized thread as a filament (the same material Edison eventually decided upon), he successfully demonstrated a true incandescent bulb in 1878 (a year earlier than Edison). Furthermore, in 1880, Swan gave the world’s first large-scale public exhibition of electric lamps at Newcastle, England.
Most people would end up saying it was Thomas Alva Edison who did it. But, hardly people know that he was not the one who achieved this feat. There are other scientists also who claimed to discover the same and that too even before Edison could do it! Most people don’t seem to know this interesting fact. The first person to experiment with electricity was Humphry Davy, an Englishman. He connected the wires to the carbon and the electric battery which he has discovered. As a result, carbon lighted. This was termed as an electric are. Much to people’s astonishment, it was an English scientist, Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914), who displayed his discovery of the carbon filament lamp in Newcastle, even before Edison could do the same. That’s not all. He even gained British patent rights a few months before Edison received the same from U.S. in 1879. In the meantime, one more scientist from U.S., Charles Francis Brush, devised some carbon arcs in 1877. He lighted a public square with the help
Well, Davy invented the first arc lamp in 1806 but it was not of much practical use. Then in 1878 Both Swan and Edison seemed to invent the incandescent light bulb at the same time but neither created a lamp that lasted for any length of time. It was Edison who manged to perfect the incandescent lamp and is thus credited with its invention.
