Who invented the light bulb?
The Invention of the Light Bulb: Davy, Swan and Edison. The first electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy, an English scientist. He experimented with electricity and invented an electric battery. When he connected wires to his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light. This is called an electric arc. Much later, in 1860, the English physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) was determined to devise a practical, long-lasting electric light. He found that a carbon paper filament worked well, but burned up quickly. In 1878, he demonstrated his new electric lamps in Newcastle, England. In 1877, the American Charles Francis Brush manufactured some carbon arcs to light a public square in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. These arcs were used on a few streets, in a few large office buildings, and even some stores. Electric lights were only used by a few people. The inventor Thomas Alva Edison (in the USA) experimented with thousands of different filaments to find just t
Who invented the lightbulb? You might be surprised by the answer. The lightbulb is a popular invention, and most people have a ready answer for this question, but there’s more to the lightbulb than meets the eye. Was the Lightbulb Invented in 1806? Humphrey Davey, from England, deserves credit for his important role in the invention of the lightbulb. In 1806, Mr. Davey met with the Royal Society to demonstrate his electric lamp. The lamp worked by using two charcoal roads parallel to one another to create a powerful electric spark. This effect was similar to the Jacob’s Ladder high-voltage effects you see in electronics labs and in mad scientist movies from the ’50s and ’60s. Unfortunately for Davey, this electric lamp was impractical for residential or even commercial lighting. The light was just too harsh and bright to be utilized in either of these settings, so Davey’s electric lamp didn’t find a commercial audience at that time. However, as technology improved and power sources evo
However, this is simply not true. Although Edison did register a patent 1879 for improvements made to existing technologies, the story of the development of the light bulb actually began about 70 years prior to the Edison patent. The idea for the light bulb was originally conceived by Humphrey Davy in 1806. Although his invention was a long way from being realized in terms of practical purposes, he provided the impetus for the modern light bulb when he publicly demonstrated a crude device called the arc lamp. Davy’s lamp worked by creating an intense electric spark between two charcoal rods, which were connected to a battery he invented. The form of light Davy developed was extremely bright – similar to what one might expect to see from a welding torch. Needless to say, Davy’s arc lamp provided much more light than was practical for use in residences, and the degree of power needed to illuminate the lamp drained the battery quickly. Although Davy’s lamp was unrealistic for personal hom
