He continued his work on the telegraph and his ideas also gave birth to the universal stock ticker. His father Samuel supervised the construction of the new laboratory; it opened in In the period from to Edison and his associates worked on at least three thousand different theories to develop an efficient incandescent lamp. Incandescent lamps make light by using electricity to heat a thin strip of material called a filament until it gets hot enough to glow.
Many inventors had tried to perfect incandescent lamps to "sub-divide" electric light or make it smaller and weaker than it was in the existing arc lamps, which were too bright to be used for small spaces such as the rooms of a house. Edison's lamp would consist of a filament housed in a glass vacuum bulb. He had his own glass blowing shed where the fragile bulbs were carefully crafted for his experiments.
Edison was trying to come up with a high resistance system that would require far less electrical power than was used for the arc lamps. This could eventually mean small electric lights suitable for home use. By January , at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting.
Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours. In order to improve the bulb, Edison needed all the persistence he had learned years before in his basement laboratory. He tested thousands and thousands of other materials to use for the filament. He even thought about using tungsten, which is the metal used for light bulb filaments now, but he couldn't work with it given the tools available at that time. One day, Edison was sitting in his laboratory absent-mindedly rolling a piece of compressed carbon between his fingers.
He began carbonizing materials to be used for the filament. He tested the carbonized filaments of every plant imaginable, including baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He even contacted biologists who sent him plant fibers from places in the tropics.
However these inefficient light bulbs are still widely used today due to many advantages such as:. Unfortunately for the incandescent bulb, legislation in many countries, including the US, has mandated phasing it out for more energy-efficient options such as compact fluorescent lamps and LED lamps.
There has been much resistance, however, to these policies owing to the low cost of incandescent bulbs, the instant availability of light and concerns of mercury contamination with CFLs. Here at Bulbs. The many benefits of LED technology are summed up in this video. Skip to content. Account Sign In. Instant Rebates are available to businesses Click to find out about your location.
BulbFinder Our easy-to-use BulbFinder will let you find the correct bulb, step by step. This rudimentary lamp burned out quickly and was much too bright for use in a home or workspace. But the principles behind Davy's arc light were used throughout the s in the development of many other electric lamps and bulbs. In , British scientist Warren de la Rue developed an efficiently designed light bulb using a coiled platinum filament in place of copper, but the high cost of platinum kept the bulb from becoming a commercial success.
And in , Englishman William Staite improved the longevity of conventional arc lamps by developing a clockwork mechanism that regulated the movement of the lamps' quick-to-erode carbon rods. But the cost of the batteries used to power Staite's lamps put a damper on the inventor's commercial ventures.
In , English chemist Joseph Swan tackled the cost-effectiveness problem of previous inventors and by he had developed a light bulb that used carbonized paper filaments in place of ones made of platinum.
Swan received a patent in the United Kingdom in , and in February he demonstrated a working lamp in a lecture in Newcastle, England, according to the Smithsonian Institution. Like earlier renditions of the light bulb, Swan's filaments were placed in a vacuum tube to minimize their exposure to oxygen , extending their lifespan.
Unfortunately for Swan, the vacuum pumps of his day were not efficient as they are now, and while his prototype worked well for a demonstration, it was impractical in actual use. Edison realized that the problem with Swan's design was the filament. A thin filament with high electrical resistance would make a lamp practical because it would require only a little current to make it glow. He demonstrated his light bulb in December Swan incorporated the improvement into his light bulbs and founded an electrical lighting company in England.
Swan wasn't the only competitor Edison faced. In , Canadian inventors Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans filed a patent for an electric lamp with different-sized carbon rods held between electrodes in a glass cylinder filled with nitrogen. Since the s, improvements in CFL performance, price, efficiency they use about 75 percent less energy than incandescents and lifetime they last about 10 times longer have made them a viable option for both renters and homeowners.
One of the fastest developing lighting technologies today is the light-emitting diode or LED. A type of solid-state lighting, LEDs use a semiconductor to convert electricity into light, are often small in area less than 1 square millimeter and emit light in a specific direction, reducing the need for reflectors and diffusers that can trap light.
They are also the most efficient lights on the market. Pale yellow and green diodes were invented next. As companies continued to improve red diodes and their manufacturing, they began appeari.
Explore the history of fluorescent lights , from the Geissler tube to CFLs. This interactive map is not viewable in your browser. Please view it in a modern browser.
Incandescent Bulbs Light the Way Long before Thomas Edison patented -- first in and then a year later in -- and began commercializing his incandescent light bulb, British inventors were demonstrating that electric light was possible with the arc lamp.
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