THE LIGHT BULB (1878) - THOMAS EDISON et al

It’s an unfortunate fact that many brilliant inventors of the past never really got the attention or recognition they deserved for their years of hard work. Sure they may have had their moment back in the day, but by and large we tend to forget most of their names pretty quickly – and that’s only if we’ve ever heard about them at all. Thomas Edison however, is a name that pretty much everyone has heard and there’s a very good reason for that, called Thomas Edison. This was largely because Edison didn’t just spend his days in a tool shed dedicated to inventing; he was also a self promoting business man with a new brand of electricity to push onto the American public known as Direct Current (or DC). The crowning jewel of this venture was the Light Bulb, which as it turns out, wasn’t really invented by Edison at all – sort of. In a typically canny move, Edison had bought the rights to earlier attempts at the light bulb from a couple of guys called Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans. Lacking the all imperative resources and financial backing, the two men were sadly unable to successfully market their designs (pretty callous of the general public, not to be impressed by artificial light). Edison however was more than happy to snap up the promising designs and tinker away with them to his hearts’ content. Such tinkering proved extremely laborious and it was only after (literally) several thousand attempts that his team concocted the first genuinely useful Incandescent Light Bulb in 1879. This was a huge deal for the 19th Century. Light was now available on demand, literally with the flick of a switch, allowing people to work and study long after the Sun went down. Admittedly it must have been romantic or poetic to use oil lamps and candles before this time, but it was probably nice to live in a house that wasn’t literally filled with small fires. What’s more, this was an awesome visual display of what science could do, inspiring a whole host of other budding inventors to explore the potential of electricity. Okay so Edison didn’t exactly invent the light bulb, but he did legitimately refine the concept, before introducing it on a grand scale and generally making the human race just that little bit better off.