History of the Light Bulb

"And God said, Let there be light and there was light"
- Bible

No I am not here to write about any kind of Biblical allusion on the occasion of Christmas but yes certainly about light. I am here to write about Light, rather Light Bulb that was entirely created by man. The world that God made is an electrified world now. The light bulb has changed human existence largely by illuminating the night and making it much more comfortable and inhabitable to many human activities that were not possible before. The electric light, one of the essentials in our lives today and the absence of which now affects our lives to an extent, was invented by Thomas Alva Edison in the year 1879. This is information that is available in the books of junior school also but then the interesting fact is this that he was not the first neither the only individual who was trying to invent an incandescent light bulb.

How was the light bulb made?

The whole invention of the light bulb has a history that starts from the early 1800s. Till that time, light sources that were available were candles, oil lanterns, and gas lamps. One day in 1809, an English chemist, Humphrey Davy, began the journey to the invention of an incandescent light source that could be used by common people in their daily work. He made use of a battery of high power to induce a flow of current between two charcoal strips. With the help of this current flowing through these two charcoal strips an intense incandescent light could be obtained which was the first step towards the creation of the first arc lamp. Sir Humphrey Davy started his experiments with platinum filaments before he came to prepare carbon arc lamps.

Though the modern electric bulbs work in a little advanced and sophisticated way, electrical current passes through a thin filament so that it gets heated and starts producing light. There is an enclosure of glass bulb, which stops the oxygen in air from reaching the hot filament that would otherwise destroy the filament of the bulb by the process of oxidation. The basic principle of operation of a light bulb is very similar to the functioning of blackbody radiation.

Between 1820 and 1840 British scientist Warren de la Rue enclosed a platinum coil in a vacuum tube and passed electric current through it. This was the first attempt to make proto-light bulb. The design was completely based on the theory that the high melting point of platinum would permit it to operate at high temperatures and that the vacuum chamber would have fewer gas molecules to react with the platinum, thus leading to a long life span of the filament. This experiment was successful and the bulb lit up bright enough but the only drawback was that the material chosen for the coil that is platinum was and still is obnoxiously expensive to obtain, thus nipping the design at the bud.

Many inventors like Frederick de Moleyns who made a powdered charcoal filament, then Heinrich Gobel who tried to make the filament with bamboo by carbonizing the shoot. Then came Joseph Wilson Swan who made the filament with carbonized paper but this bulb had its limitations like it could be used only when you are close to the source of the light then again he tried to experiment with cotton as the filament. Now when everybody knew the basic shape and the theory of function, all the experts were trying to invent the right material to make filament. Thomas Edison was trying hard to improve on the earlier models and he actually made a bulb that had bamboo fiber filament and that actually lasted for somewhere around twelve to fifteen hundred hours. He also improved on the evacuation of the bulb, which showed effective results. So he succeeded in creating the bulb that was cost-effective and had long life, thus making the light bulbs the essential parts of our household as they are now.