Author DM Celley

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WAS EDISON THE FIRST TO INVENT THE LIGHTBULB?

Thomas Edison was the first inventor to patent an incandescent lightbulb that was feasible and durable enough to be manufactured and deployed in an electric system.  This was at a time in history when many inventors were looking for an inexpensive way to replace gas lighting.  In January, 1880, Edison was granted a patent for an incandescent electric lamp using a carbon filament.  After the patent was granted, Edison discovered that the best filament material would be carbonized bamboo that lasted over 1200 hours.  However, his 1880 patent was invalidated two years afterward when it was discovered to have been based on the work of William Edward Sawyer.  In 1889 a court established Edison’s claim to an improved incandescent lamp with the carbonized bamboo.  In 1880 Edison installed the first working commercial application of his incandescent lamp on the SS Columbia, a passenger and cargo steam ship.  The system lasted until it was removed from Columbia in 1895.  In January, 1881, the first commercial building to install and use Edison’s complete incandescent lighting system was Hinds and Ketcham, a New York based printing company.  In September, 1882, Edison installed the first commercial central power system using incandescent lighting in lower Manhattan.

However, there were several other inventors during this period that had a place in the story of the rise of the commercial incandescent light.  Here are summaries of the efforts of a few of the more prominent ones.

Humphry Davy:  British inventor who was credited with inventing the first incandescent light in 1815 by passing an electric current through a thin strip of platinum.  He later invented a much more powerful form of incandescent light by passing an electric current through two carbon rods creating an arc.

James Bowman Lindsay:  Scottish inventor who demonstrated an incandescent lamp at a public meeting in Dundee, Scotland in 1835.  He was able to read a book in a dark room at a distance of one and a half feet.  However, he did not pursue this invention and had little in the way of documentation to support his work. 

Warren De La Rue:  British scientist developed an efficient lightbulb with a coiled platinum filament in 1840.  However, the high cost of platinum kept the invention from becoming a commercial success. 

Moses G. Farmer:  American electrical engineer and inventor who invented an incandescent lamp that used a platinum filament in 1859.  He used incandescent lighting to light up the parlor of his home in Salem, Massachusetts, making it the first residence to be lit up by electricity.  His patent for the incandescent lamp was later acquired by Edison.

Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans:  Canadian inventors who were the first to patent an incandescent lamp in 1874, or five years before Edison’s patent.  Woodward and Evans lacked the financial backing to commercialize their invention and it was never transformed by the inventors into a working electrical system.  The patent was later sold to Edison.

William E. Sawyer:  An American inventor who is best known for pioneering the development of the incandescent lightbulb.  With his partner, Albon Man, they formed the Electro-Dynamic Light Company in July, 1878, to manufacture incandescent lamps.  The company was forced to defend its patents (successfully) against Edison.  The patent litigation continued until the company was bought by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Edison’s rival in the AC/DC current wars. 

Joseph Swan:  British physicist and inventor who developed incandescent lamps as early as 1850, and produced a bulb that worked, but only for a short time owing in part to the lack of a good vacuum.  He invented a vacuum pump which used mercury to trap air that was to be evacuated.  The design was exploited by another inventor named Herman Sprengel, but in 1883 Swan formed a partnership with Edison to manufacture incandescent lamps in Britain that used the Sprengel vacuum pump and a cellulose filament.  The merger, in part, was to avert expensive patent litigation as it was determined that both Edison and Swan had invented the same thing while working independently of each other.  The company was acquired by the conglomerate Associated Electrical Industries in the late 1920’s. 

Heinrich Gobel:  German born inventor who claimed to have built incandescent lamps as early as 1854 for his personal use.  The claim was challenged in patent litigation by Edison and company in 1885.  Gobel’s defense included witnesses who claimed to have seen his incandescent lamps in operation at his home or at his office in New York.  In 1892 after seven years of litigation and appeals, an injunction was granted to Edison and upheld that confirmed Edison’s right to the patent.  This was important for Edison as the defense Gobel used lacked evidence to support it and therefore lacked credibility; but it was used in several other cases where Edison sought injunctions to block other companies’ production of incandescent lamps. 

Hiram Maxim:  was an American born British inventor who developed and installed the first incandescent electric lights in a New York City building—the Equitable Life Building.  He wound up in several patent disputes with Edison, one of which was over the incandescent lightbulb.  Maxim claimed that an employee of his had falsely patented the incandescent bulb under his own name.  Edison was able to prove the claim to be false, but because it was a matter of court record under patent law at the time the information would become available to the public.  This would permit Edison to manufacture incandescent lightbulbs with Maxim’s added technology without crediting Maxim as the true inventor. 

Lewis Latimer:  An American employee of Hiram Maxim in the United States Electric Lighting Company, Latimer invented a modification to the process for making carbon filaments for lightbulbs and patented the process in 1882.  The modification involved placing the blank filaments inside a cardboard envelope during carbonization, that helped reduce breakages during the carbonization process.  In 1884 Latimer went to work for Edison as a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigation. 

Summary:  In a 1900 edition of the Electrical World and Engineer, the following excerpt was published: 

“The first incandescent lamp [developed by Woodward and Evans] was constructed at Morrison’s brass foundry in Toronto and was a very crude affair. It consisted of a water gauge glass with a piece of carbon, filed by hand and drilled at each end, for the electrodes, and hermetically sealed at both ends, having a petcock at one end with a brass tube to exhaust the air. Woodward made the mistake of filling the tube or globe of this lamp with nitrogen after having exhausted the air. Prof. Elihu Thomson is quoted as having said that had he [Woodward] stopped when he had the tube exhausted he would have had the honor of being the inventor of the incandescent light as used for commercial purposes… the principle of the incandescent lamp dates several decades before the Woodward experiments, and that King, Chanzy, Farmer and others in the twenty years preceding 1860 made and used incandescent lamps much superior to the very imperfect one upon which Woodward’s claims are based. Moreover, the Edison claims, as sustained in the courts, were not on the discovery of the principles of the incandescent lamp but on a definite combination of parts—all well known—which resulted in the production of a practical form of the incandescent lamp.”

Conclusion:  Although Edison was not the first to invent the incandescent lightbulb, he was able to develop it to the point that it could be widely implemented to replace gas lighting in homes and public buildings.  He also was the first to operate a laboratory for industrial research and development.  He is widely accepted as the foremost pioneer in bringing electric technology to modern society.  The claim Edison made to manufacture incandescent lamps is owed in part to his ability to deal successfully with patents and patent laws.  His product became the standard for the time by resolving the shortcomings, both technically and legally, of his contemporaries.  Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel concluded that Edison’s version of the incandescent lamp succeeded over competitors because of a combination of three factors:  an effective filament, a higher vacuum, and a high rate of resistance that enabled power distribution from a centralized source.

Sources:         Wikipedia

                        Britannica.com

                        History.com

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