Ask anyone who invented the light bulb and most people would probably say Thomas Edison. And yet, whilst Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879, the invention was (like many innovations) a cumulative and widely collaborative affair.
Several innovators paved the way for the modern electric light bulb including Alessandro Volta, Humphrey Davy, Warren de la Rue, and Joseph Swan. There were multiple developments and advancements in the technology over many years and multiple versions of the light bulb that were created before Thomas Edison patented his incandescent carbon filament bulb in 1879.
The innovation journey for the light bulb arguably began as far back as 1800 when the Italian inventor Alessandro Volta developed the voltaic pile – alternating layers of zinc, copper and wet cardboard which became the first practical way to generate electricity and a very early version of the battery. When Volta connected a copper wire to each end of the pile of metal and wet cardboard it conducted electricity but the copper wire also glowed. As well as being the first continuous source of electricity, this is thought to be one of the earliest examples of incandescent lighting.
After Volta had presented his invention to the Royal Society in London, Humphrey Davy used voltaic piles and charcoal electrodes to create the first electric arc lamp in 1802. The bright arc of light that appeared between two carbon rods gave it its name, but whilst the principles behind the arc lamp were used throughout the 1800s in developing electric lamps and even street lights in several cities, it was not the most practical form of electric lighting. This came closer when the scientist Warren De La Rue developed a more efficient bulb in the 1840s which used coiled platinum filaments rather than copper. But the high cost of platinum prevented this from becoming widespread.
It was not until the 1860s and 1870s that the British chemist Joseph Swan found a way to make the electric light bulb more economical whilst still being efficient. His version used carbonized paper filaments and Swan secured a patent in the UK for this innovation in 1878. But there were still barriers to the bulb becoming commercially viable – the prototype didn’t have a good enough vacuum inside the bulb for it to be efficient.
Edison knew that in order to make it truly viable, the bulb would have to only use a small amount of current to glow brightly, and that the vacuum inside it needed to be better. Edison combined an improved vacuum inside the bulb with first platinum, and then thin carbon filaments which meant that it was not only efficient but it was also commercial. This was apparently the result of 3,000 designs and hundreds of tests which his team conducted, and the patent was filed and granted in 1879. When Swan updated his innovation to incorporate Edison’s changes, the latter sued him for copyright infringement. But the two innovators ended up actually working together to form the ‘Ediswan’ company which became one of the largest manufacturers of lightbulbs in the world.
The story of how a commercially viable lightbulb came about demonstrates a number of under-appreciated aspects of innovation. We tend to think about breakthrough inventions like the light bulb as the work of a lone inventor who has a breakthrough innovation (a lightbulb moment perhaps :-)). And yet so many innovations are the culmination of a series of smaller breakthroughs or advances which have likely involved multiple innovators at various stages who have individually solved important problems in ways that have enabled progress.
It’s also a lesson in just how long the gestation period of major innovations can be. This is what Bill Buxton once called the ‘long nose of innovation’, a reference to how the bulk of innovations for significant breakthroughs is ‘low-amplitude’ and takes place over a long period. Thomas Edison patented a lightbulb based on experiments that built on the work of those who came before him.
The light bulb also teaches us about how critical commercial viability, or scalability is to innovation and how often great ideas need a whole lot more great thinking to improve them in ways that can enable them to benefit many people. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter believed that the process of technological-driven change was comprised of three main stages: invention (the origination of a new idea), innovation (the commercialisation of the idea), and diffusion (the adoption and scaling of the new discovery). Invention, or coming up with the idea, is only the first part of the innovation process.
And that leads us on to another, essential lesson from the invention of the light bulb. Because the story does not end there. There was another innovator who played a critical role in enabling the modern electric light bulb to truly work and scale. Lewis Howard Latimer was the son of two parents that had both escaped slavery. He became an inventor and a draftsman, and worked with Alexander Graham Bell to patent the invention of the telephone before Bell’s rival inventors could (yes, this was another innovation in which multiple innovators had a hand).
In 1879 he moved to Connecticut to work as a draftsman for the U.S. Electric Lighting Company which was owned by Edison rival Hiram Maxim. Whilst there he invented and patented a far more efficient way of manufacturing the carbon filaments which proved to be essential to making the new invention of the lightbulb work at scale.
The new technique was effective at reducing the filament breakages which often happened during the carbonisation process. This made the filaments a lot more durable, dramatically improved the longevity of the electric light bulb and made it way more efficient to produce. So much so that the innovation was central to making the light bulb more practical for everyday use, and in turn accessible and affordable. It was Latimer’s innovation that truly enabled the electric light bulb to work as intended, to be commercially viable, and to work at scale as a product. And yet we so rarely hear Latimer’s name associated with one of the most important innovations of the 19th Century.
Unsurprisingly, Latimer went to work with Edison after his innovation got adopted and he ended up writing the first book on electric lighting (Incandescent Electric Lighting, 1890) and supervising the role out of public electric lights in a series of cities including New York, London, Philadelphia and Montreal. He played a huge but often under-acknowledged part in this innovation story.
Ex cricketer Michael Holden talks powerfully in this video about how often history and stories are written and popularised in a way that suits a certain narrative (thanks Afolabi for the link). Being a black inventor in the 1800s can’t have been easy, but this is perhaps a good example of how important it is to recognise how important innovations actually do happen, and the role that brilliant individuals and ideas have played in bringing them to life, and how often popular history does not reflect this.
Thomas Edison is routinely credited with the invention of the light bulb, but he was in so many ways standing on the shoulders of other innovators. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.
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Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
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