Everyone knows we have to thank Thomas Edison for inventing the electric lightbulb, one of the most impactful innovations in human history … or do we? Regarded by many as the greatest inventor of all time, Edison secured over 1,000 patents in his name. But throughout his life and after it, the man was dogged by accusations of plagiarism. The truth is that Edison often acted more as an improver than an inventor, with an unwillingness to give credit to those whose ideas he built upon. The electric lightbulb, his greatest claim to fame, was no different.
Edison released his famous lightbulb in 1879, and it became the first commercially successful form of electric lighting in the world. However, the roots of this technology can be traced back over three-quarters of a century earlier, long before Edison was even born. It would be wrong to say that the lightbulb was a singular invention. Rather, it was a technology developed over decades, through incremental achievements made by several people across both the United States and Europe. The earliest forms of electric lighting will look very unfamiliar from a modern vantage point, but without them, the work of Thomas Edison, and all the advancements made after him, would not have been possible.
The first pioneers of electric lighting
The story of electric lighting begins with the very first battery. For that, we can thank Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist whose surname has become synonymous with electricity (he is the namesake of “voltage,” a measurement of electric tension). Volta began experimenting with electricity in his mid-20s, devising an electrostatic generator and recording groundbreaking work in the conductivity of metals.
Volta’s greatest contribution, however, came in 1800, when he unveiled the voltaic pile, a stack of alternating zinc and copper discs interspersed with pieces of cloth soaked in salt water. It was the first device capable of producing a continuous current and is therefore remembered as the first true battery. But since the voltaic pile emitted a glow, it can also be argued as the first electrical light.
Volta garnered much publicity after making high-profile demonstrations of his invention to the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Royal Society of London. This inspired other inventors to start toying with his technology, including English chemist Humphry Davy. Davy would make the next great stride in electric lighting in 1802, when he connected voltaic piles to a pair of charcoal electrodes, producing an arc of light between them. This was the first example of an arc light, a technology still used in searchlights and film projectors. Davy’s arc lamp burned too bright and fizzled out too fast for it to gain widespread use, but it became a foundational technology on which future breakthroughs in lighting were made.
Creating light in a vacuum
The early work of Alessandro Volta and Humphry Davy brought the world its first forms of electric lighting, but they weren’t technically lightbulbs. A true incandescent lightbulb emits light by heating a filament inside a vacuum chamber. The vacuum is necessary to prevent the filament from degrading due to oxidation. This step in lighting technology didn’t come about until several decades after the Davy arc lamp was unveiled, but they offered light for a longer duration, and the search for the ideal filament became central to the quest to invent a practical electrical lighting system.
An early pioneer of incandescent light bulbs was the Scottish scientist James Bowman Lindsay, who in 1835 demonstrated a lamp made with a copper filament. In 1938, Belgian inventor Marcellin Jobard encased carbon filaments in vacuum tubes. Neither of these filaments was long-lasting enough to provide a practical lighting source, and their creators struggled to create the true vacuum seal required to protect the filament. In 1840, British scientist Warren de la Rue, best known as a pioneer in astronomical photography, unveiled a lightbulb made with a platinum filament. Platinum has a very high melting point, so it can take a huge jolt of electricity and not risk bursting into flames. De la Rue’s lightbulb could shine longer than any of its predecessors, but due to the exorbitant cost of producing platinum, it never became commercially viable as a means of lighting.
Edison’s contemporary rivals
The quest to design a practical electric lightbulb reached its zenith in the 1870s. The decade famously ended with Edison’s public demonstration of his light on New Year’s Eve 1879, but the run-up to this momentous occasion saw two other prominent inventors advancing neck-and-neck against the Wizard of Menlo Park.
Hiram Maxim and Joseph Swan were perhaps Edison’s most prominent contemporary rivals in the race to patent a practical lightbulb. Maxim, the leading engineer of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, submitted a patent application for an electric lightbulb around the same time as Edison, but it wasn’t granted until after Edison had performed his New Year’s demonstration to tremendous publicity. Maxim’s company was actually responsible for the very first commercial installation of electric lighting in 1880, which was done entirely with his design. However, Edison had so much fame at that point that the public generally assumed he deserved the credit. This deeply upset Maxim, and both inventors accused each other of stealing ideas.
Also in 1880, Joseph Swan received the first British patent for an electric lightbulb, using a filament made of carbonized paper. His lighting design achieved widespread public use ahead of Edison’s, and Swan’s home is credited as the first residence in the world fully lit by electricity. Edison sued Swan for patent infringement, but he lost the case, and Swan’s patent stood. However, in a surprising twist, the rival inventors ended up partnering to form a company called Ediswan, which immediately took over the British lighting market.
What did Edison actually accomplish?
Just because other people also deserve credit for inventing the lightbulb doesn’t mean Thomas Edison deserves none. After all, he paid close attention to the failures of other inventors and recognized that the shortcoming most early lightbulbs faced was a poor choice of material for the filament. When Edison filed for a patent in 1879, he got around this issue by including several potential filament materials in the design. He continued to experiment with filaments in the coming year, and shortly after his patent was granted, he settled on carbonized bamboo as the optical choice. Decades later, tungsten would become the standard for filaments, and it remains so today (although the longest-burning lightbulb in history uses thick carbon).
Edison’s greatest innovation was practicality. Earlier pioneers like Marcellin Jobard and Warren de la Rue may have invented lightbulbs earlier than Edison, but their designs were not of much use to the public. Edison’s design burned for longer while consuming less electricity than its predecessors. This, combined with his aggressive pursuit of patents and his flair for self-promotion, is why the Wizard of Menlo Park became synonymous with electric lighting.
Edison is proof that the very concept of an “inventor” is flawed, as invention is almost never a singular act. Rather, it’s a long process involving many incremental steps made by many different people. One place Edison consistently failed was in giving credit to those whose shoulders he stood on, but hopefully this article has shed a little light on those deserving names.
