Electric Bulb

In 1802 Humphry Davy had what was then the most powerful battery in the world at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In that year he created the first incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum, chosen because the metal had an extremely high melting point. It was not bright enough nor did it last long enough to be practical, but it was the precedent behind the efforts of scores of experimenters over the next 75 years until Thomas Edison's creation of the first practical incandescent lamp in 1879. In 1809 Davy created the first arc lamp by making a small but blinding electrical connection between two charcoal rods connected to a 2000 cell battery. Demonstrated to the Royal Institution in 1810, the invention came to be known as the Arc lamp(in the pic below).
In 1835 James Bowman Lindsay(in the pic) demonstrated a constant electric light at a public meeting in Dundee, Scotland. He stated that he could "read a book at a distance of one and a half feet". However, having perfected the device to his own satisfaction, he turned to the problem of wireless telegraphy and did not develop the electric light any further. His claims are not well documented.
In 1840, British scientist Warren de la Rue enclosed a platinum coil in a vacuum tube and passed an electric current through it. The design was based on the concept that the high melting point of platinum would allow it to operate at high temperatures and that the evacuated chamber would contain fewer gas molecules to react with the platinum, improving its longevity. Although an efficient design, the cost of the platinum made it impractical for commercial use.
In 1841 Frederick de Moleyns of England was granted the first patent for an incandescent lamp, with a design using powdered charcoal heated between two platinum wires contained within a vacuum bulb.
In 1845 American John Wellington Starr acquired a patent for his own incandescent light bulb involving the use of carbon filaments. He died shortly after obtaining the patent. Aside from the information contained in the patent itself, little else is known about him.
In 1851 Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin publicly demonstrated incandescent light bulbs on his estate in Blois, France. His light bulbs are on permanent display in the museum of the Chateau of Blois.
In 1872 Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin(as in the pic)invented an incandescent light bulb. In 1874 he got a patent for his invention.
In a suit filed by rivals seeking to get around Edison's lightbulb patent, the German-American inventor Heinrich Göbel claimed he had developed the first light bulb in 1854: a carbonized bamboo filament, in a vacuum bottle to prevent oxidation, and that in the following five years he developed what many call the first practical light bulb. Lewis Latimer(in the pic) demonstrated that the bulbs Göbel had purportedly built in the 1850s had actually been built much later, and actually found the glassblower who had constructed the fraudulent exhibits for Göbel.In a patent interference suit in 1893, the judge ruled that Göbel's claim was "extremely improbable."
Joseph Wilson Swan (1828–1914) was a physicist and druggist (chemist) born in Sunderland, United Kingdom. In 1850 he began working with carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. By 1860 he was able to demonstrate a working device but the lack of a good vacuum and an adequate supply of electricity resulted in a short lifetime for the bulb and an inefficient source of light. By the mid-1870s better pumps became available, and Swan returned to his experiments. With the help of Charles Stearn, an expert on vacuum pumps, Swan developed a method of processing that avoided the early bulb blackening in 1878. (This received a British Patent No 8 in 1880.[8] On 18th December 1878 a lamp using a slender carbon rod was shown at a meeting of the Newcastle Chemical Society, and he gave a working demonstration at their meeting on 17th January 1879. It was also shown to 700 who attended a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle on 3rd February 1879. Swan turned his attention to producing a better carbon filament and the means of attaching its ends. He devised a method of treating cotton to produce 'parchmentised thread' and obtained British Patent 4933 in 1880.[9] From this year he began installing light bulbs in homes and landmarks in England, and in the early 1880s he had started his own company.
In North America, parallel developments were also taking place. On July 24, 1874 a Canadian patent was filed for the Woodward and Evans Light by a Toronto medical electrician named Henry Woodward (in the pic aside) and a colleague Mathew Evans(in the pic below). They built their lamps with different sizes and shapes of carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. Woodward and Evans attempted to commercialize their lamp, but were unsuccessful.
Thomas Edison began serious research into developing a practical incandescent lamp in 1878. Edison filed his first patent application for "Improvement In Electric Lights" on October 14, 1878 (U.S. Patent 0,214,636 ). After many experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22, 1879;[11] and lasted 13.5 hours. Edison continued to improve this design and by Nov 4, 1879, filed for a U.S. patent (granted as U.S. Patent 0,223,898 on Jan 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires."[12] Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways,"[12] it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.
Hiram S. Maxim started a lightbulb company in 1878 to exploit his patents and those of William Sawyer. His United States Electric Lighting Company was the second company to sell practical incandescent electric lamps, after Edison. They made their first commercial installation of incandescent lamps at the Mercantile Safe Deposit Company in New York City in the fall of 1880, about six months after the Edison incandescent lamps had been installed on the steamer Columbia. Maxim in October 1880 patented a method of coating carbon filaments with hydrocarbons to extend their life. Lewis Latimer, his employee at the time, developed an improved method of heat treating them which reduced breakage and allowed them to be molded into novel shapes, such as the characteristic "M" shape of Maxim filaments. On January 17, 1882, Latimer received a patent for the "Process of Manufacturing Carbons", an improved method for the production of light bulb filaments which was purchased by the United States Electric Light Company. Latimer patented other improvements such as a better way of attaching filaments to their wire supports.
In Britain, the Edison and Swan companies merged into the Edison and Swan United Electric Company (later known as Ediswan, which was then incorporated into Thorn Lighting Ltd). Edison was initially against this combination, but after Swan sued him and won, Edison was eventually forced to cooperate, and the merger was made. Eventually, Edison acquired all of Swan's interest in the company. Swan sold his United States patent rights to the Brush Electric Company(as in the pic) in June 1882. Swan later wrote that Edison had a greater claim to the light than he, in order to protect Edison's patents from claims against them in the US.
The United States Patent Office gave a ruling October 8, 1883 that Edison's patents were based on the prior art of William Sawyer and were invalid. Litigation continued for a number of years. Eventually on October 6, 1889, a judge ruled that Edison's electric light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of high resistance" was valid.
In addressing the question "Who invented the incandescent lamp?" historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel (1987, 115-117) list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Swan and Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable. Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he invented an entire, integrated system of electric lighting. "The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting." (Hughes 1977, 9)
In the 1890s, the Austrian inventor Carl Auer von Welsbach(as in the pic) worked on metal-filament mantles, first with platinum wiring, and then osmium, and produced an operative version in 1898.
In 1897, German physicist and chemist Walther Nernst developed the Nernst lamp, a form of incandescent lamp that used a ceramic globar and did not require enclosure in a vacuum or inert gas. Twice as efficient as carbon filament lamps, Nernst lamps were briefly popular until overtaken by lamps using metal filaments.
In 1903, Willis Whitnew(is in the pic below) invented a filament that would not blacken the inside of a light bulb. (Some of Edison's experiments to stop this blackening led to the invention of the electronic vacuum tube.) It was a metal-coated carbon filament. In 1906, the General Electric Company was the first to patent a method of making tungsten filaments for use in incandescent light bulbs. In the same year Franjo Hannaman, a Croatian from Zagreb, invented a tungsten (wolfram) filament lamp, which lasted longer and gave a brighter light than the carbon filament. Tungsten filaments were costly, but by 1910 William David Coolidge (1873–1975) had invented an improved method of making tungsten filaments. The tungsten filament outlasted all other types of filaments and Coolidge made the costs practical. Marvin Pipkin, an American chemist, in 1924 patented a process for frosting the inside of lamp bulbs without weakening them, and in 1947 patented a process for coating the inside of lamps with silica.