Who invented the light bulb

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The Menlo Park lab of Thomas Edison, who invented the lightbulb, is shown here after its relocation to the Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan. The arrow on the vacuum pump (center) marks the site of Edison's recreation of the lighting of the incandescent bulb on Oct. 21, 1929. (Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Early research & development The story of the lightbulb begins long before Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879. In 1800, Italian inventor Alessandro Volta developed the first practical method of generating electricity, the voltaic pile. Made of alternating discs of zinc and copper— interspersed with layers of cardboard soaked in salt water — the pile conducted electricity when a copper wire was connected at either end. Volta's glowing copper wire is officially considered a precursor to the battery, but is also one of the earliest manifestations of incandescent lighting. According to Harold H Schobert (" Energy and Society: An Introduction," CRC Press, 2014) the Voltaic Pile "made it possible for scientists to experiment with electric currents under controlled conditions" and furthered experiments with electricity. Not long after Volta presented his discovery of a continuous source of electricity to the Royal Society in London, Davy produced the world's first electric lamp by connecting voltaic piles to charcoal electrodes. Davy's 1802 invention was known as an electric arc lamp, named for the bright arc of...

The electric light wasn’t Thomas Edison’s first invention, nor was he the first to create an alternative to gaslight. Electric lights already existed on a streetlight scale when, on this day in 1879, Edison tested the one he’s famous for. Though he didn’t come up with the whole concept, his light bulb was the first that proved practical, and affordable, for home illumination. The trick had been choosing a filament that would be durable but inexpensive, and the team at Edison’s “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Times reporter who toured the factory just after his successful test run: “As there is no oxygen to burn,” said Mr. Edison, “you can readily see that this piece of carbon will last an ordinary life-time. It has the property of resisting the heat of the current of electricity, while at the same time it becomes incandescent, and gives out one of the most brilliant lights which the world has ever seen. The cost of preparing one of these little horse-shoes of carbon is about 1 cent, and the entire lamp will cost not more than 25 cents.” While Edison considered the invention his “crowning triumph,” it joined the long list of contributions that made him a record-holder for sheer number of U.S. patents — 1,093 — until the 21st century. His And although his accomplishments spoke for themselves, Edison was equally prolific, and ambitious, in inventing myths to boost his reputation as a larger-than-life innovator, as “Untrue,” says TIME. “He had at least three yea...

A widely shared post on social media says Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb but stole it from a Black man called Lewis Latimer. Latimer made a major contribution to the development of electric lighting by inventing a longer-lasting filament. But he did not invent the lightbulb. Thomas Edison is regularly identified as the inventor, though that claim is itself often challenged. The post ( U.S. President Joe Biden echoed the message at a community meeting in Kenosha, Wisconsin on the campaign trail on Sept. 3, 2020, when he said: “A Black man invented the lightbulb not a white guy named Edison,” as seen Politifact, Snopes and CNN fact-checked Biden’s claim at the time and found it to be partly false ( LATIMER Lewis Latimer (1848-1928) was an African-American inventor, electrical pioneer and patent expert ( After 11 years working as a patent lawyer for inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell (working on the telephone) and Hiram Maxim (in his United States Electric Lighting Company), Latimer started to work with Edison General Electric in the late 1880s as a patent expert (see from the five minute-mark in the video In 1890 he published a book on the Edison system and the development of the incandescent light by Edison, called “Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System” ( The website for the museum based in his old house says Latimer “invented the carbon filament, a significant improvement in the production of the incandescent light b...