A famous stage magician was showing off light bulbs before Edison was born
In 1851 the French illusionist Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin lit incandescent bulbs on his estate at Blois, and they now sit in the town's chateau museum. He was one of dozens who glowed wires in glass long before Thomas Edison, whose real triumph was not the bulb itself but everything wired up around it.
The basic trick is old. Ebenezer Kinnersley heated a wire until it glowed in 1761, and in 1802 Humphry Davy used a vast battery of 2,000 cells in the basement of the Royal Institution to make a strip of platinum shine. It was too dim and short-lived to use, but it inspired decades of tinkering. Bare wires melted or burned in air, so experimenters sealed them in glass, either pumped empty or filled with an unreactive gas.
The roll of early inventors is long. In Dundee in 1835 James Bowman Lindsay claimed his steady electric light let him read a book from a foot and a half away. Warren De la Rue coiled platinum inside a vacuum tube in 1840, a workable design killed by the price of the metal, and Frederick de Moleyns won the first patent the next year. The Russian Alexander Lodygin patented a nitrogen-filled carbon lamp in 1874, and in Canada Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans filed a patent that Edison later bought; Canada's government still credits the pair.
In Britain, Joseph Swan experimented with carbonised paper from 1850. His bulbs lit Mosley Street in Newcastle, the first street lit by incandescent lamps, in 1880, and a year later illuminated the Savoy Theatre in London, the first public building lit wholly by electricity. His own house in Gateshead was the first home with electric light bulbs. Edison's team logged a 13.5-hour test in October 1879 and later found that carbonised Japanese bamboo could burn for over 1,200 hours.
Historians argue Edison won because he combined a high vacuum, a high-resistance filament that made central power stations economical, and a whole system of generators, mains and parallel wiring. The bulb itself is wasteful: under 5 percent of its energy becomes visible light, giving about 16 lumens per watt against roughly 100 for a typical LED, which is why it has steadily lost ground.
Source: Incandescent light bulb
