Word: bulb
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Candles and kerosene lamps flickered that Sunday night as the lab assistant connected two wires leading from the bottom of a glass bulb to a set of storage batteries. The piece of carbonized cotton sewing thread inside the bulb suddenly lighted up. In dozens of earlier experiments, the filament had blazed a few minutes before breaking, but this time it continued to glow. Forty hours later the bulb was still alight, and Thomas Alva Edison boasted to his staff: "If it will burn that number of hours now, I know I can make it burn a hundred." Man had entered...
...watch a re-enactment of the scene. Madeline Edison Sloane, the inventor's great-granddaughter, will throw the switch that opened a new era. As the German historian Emil Ludwig described the original event, "When Edison snatched up the spark of Prometheus in his little pear-shaped glass bulb, it meant that fire had been discovered for the second time, that mankind had been delivered again from the curse of night...
...first practical electric light, and a power-distribution system that put it cheaply into every home. Like much else about Edison, the precise date is in dispute, but the inventor himself remembered Oct. 21, 1879, as the day on which he began the test of the first successful light bulb...
...number of materials, he hit on carbon. He tried to give the impression that he came up with that idea independently. In fact, says Biographer Conot, his laboratory notebooks prove that he read and underlined reports of the experiments of Joseph Swan in England. Swan had invented an electric bulb that used a fine carbon...
There were technical differences between the bulbs that, Edison's partisans say, made his superior. For example, Swan's carbon rod was fairly thick, Edison's filament was thin. But a crucial difference was that Swan stopped with inventing the bulb, while Edison took what would now be called a "systems approach"; he saw that the bulb had to be only one of a whole series of inventions. To make it in the first place, he and his assistants had to produce a more complete vacuum than had ever been known before. Then they had to devise...