Realising that platinum was too expensive a commodity to be used in electric lighting, he pursued the avenue of a carbon-coated bamboo filament anecdotally, he had the idea of using bamboo from observing his fishing rod while on a field trip to watch an eclipse. He also wheeled and dealed, scooping up patents of other engineers, while forming strategic alliances, especially with his British competitor, Joseph Swan who, in many ways, was a player of equal importance, whose house was the first to be lit by a light bulb.
Edison secured substantial financial backing from both the Vanderbilt family - the richest in America, having made their money in shipping and the railway - as well as the corporate financier J. Yet it was mostly by sheer visionary ingenuity that the man with more than a thousand patents to his name became the driving force behind lighting up the 20th century.
For much of the 20th century it seemed the incandescent light bulb had no serious challenger. Yet with growing pressure to improve energy efficiency, in the closing decades the writing was on the wall. He could hardly have expected that, within a century, the incandescent light bulb to which he had contributed so much would be turning night into day.
It would illuminate our lives, extend office hours and make football stadiums glow in the dark. It would provide security and illumination for public buildings and searchlights to guide wartime anti-aircraft weaponry. Roads would be lit to accommodate the relentless rise of the automobile and night-ready airports would revolutionise international freight.
With the dawn of the 20th century came an unprecedented opportunity for developers of the newly established incandescent light bulb. Applications were limitless, ranging from the extremely modest such as bicycle headlamps to national infrastructure such as road lighting.
The field was open and the market was soon awash with manufacturers hoping to cash in on the gold rush in artificial lighting. Yet, by Christmas , household names such as Osram, Philips and General Electric were becoming nervous. This was because the market, while booming, was becoming unpredictable. After seeing his sales tumble from 63 million units in by more than half in the following year, the head of Osram, William Meinhardt, proposed that he met with his competitors to agree on trading principles that would safeguard their future.
While Christmas tree lights festooned the Swiss city of Geneva, on 23rd December , the top brass of the global incandescent manufacturing community colluded to form the Phoebus Cartel to establish quotas and territories, share knowledge and agree on standards such as the Edison screw-in connector.
Yet the hidden agenda was revenue protection in a market where manufacturers were becoming victims of their own success. Even back in the third decade of the 20th century, light-bulb manufacturing was so advanced that units had an operational life of 2, hours, meaning that it was years before units needed replacing. To ensure companies complied with the new obsolescence regulations, they were obliged to send their products for independent testing in Switzerland.
If the products displayed unwanted longevity, manufacturers faced heavy fines. Despite the cartel deliberately stagnating technological development, the incandescent bulb gained traction as one of the great innovations of the time. It was another energy shortage -- the oil crisis -- that caused lighting engineers to develop a fluorescent bulb that could be used in residential applications.
In , researchers at Sylvania started investigating how they could miniaturize the ballast and tuck it into the lamp. Two years later in , Edward Hammer at General Electric figured out how to bend the fluorescent tube into a spiral shape, creating the first compact fluorescent light CFL. Like Sylvania, General Electric shelved this design because the new machinery needed to mass-produce these lights was too expensive.
Consumers pointed to the high price as their number one obstacle in purchasing CFLs. 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. Related Stories. Apple Pay Starts Today. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. In November , Edison filed a patent for an electric lamp with a carbon filament.
The patent listed several materials that might be used for the filament, including cotton, linen and wood. Edison spent the next year finding the perfect filament for his new bulb, testing more than 6, plants to determine which material would burn the longest. Several months after the patent was granted, Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could burn for more than 1, hours.
Bamboo was used for the filaments in Edison's bulbs until it began to be replaced by longer-lasting materials in the s and early s. In , Lewis Howard Latimer, one of Edison's researchers, patented a more efficient way of manufacturing carbon filaments. And in , Willis R. Whitney invented a treatment for these filaments that allowed them to burn bright without darkening the insides of their glass bulbs. William David Coolidge, an American physicist with General Electric, improved the company's method of manufacturing tungsten filaments in Tungsten , which has the highest melting point of any chemical element, was known by Edison to be an excellent material for light bulb filaments, but the machinery needed to produce super-fine tungsten wire was not available in the late 19th century.
Tungsten is still the primary material used in incandescent bulb filaments today. Light-emitting diodes LEDs are now considered the future of lighting due to a lower energy requirement to run, a lower monthly price tag, and a longer life than traditional incandescent light bulbs.
Nick Holonyak, an American scientist at General Electric, accidently invented the red LED light while trying to create a laser in the early s. As with other inventors, the principle that some semiconductors glowed when an electric current was applied had been known since the early s, but Holonyak was the first to patent it for use as a light fixture.
Within a few years, yellow and green LEDs were added to the mix and used in several applications including indicator lights, calculator displays, and traffic lights, according to the DOE.
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