Who Invented the Light Bulb?

Who Invented the Light Bulb?

If you answered Thomas Edison, think again.

At the end of the Civil War in 1865, the reunited states of America entered a new era of commerce and entrepreneurship. Businessmen made their fortunes supplying the vast marketplace of the Midwest with the latest domestic appliances and tools. Lighting was one area in which huge technological strides were made. And with the development of electricity as a reliable power source, a race began in the late 1870s to patent an efficient form of electrical lighting. At the forefront of this contest were two American inventors, Thomas Alva Edison and Hiram Maxim.

Edison was already famous for his invention of the phonograph and various telegraph instruments. But he was at least as much a businessman as he was an inventor. Edison approached investors directly rather than submit himself to the industrialists and their specifications. His experience of developing prototypes of other inventions had made him familiar with the loopholes in patent laws. As a result Edison's usual practice was to patent every advance made by his research team, however small.

Hiram Maxim, on the other hand, was an archetypal inventor - ploughing away, busily working on ideas, but not giving a thought to their commercial potential until after the final "eureka" moment.

In his mid 20s he had invented the first sprinkler system in Boston, only to fail to impress investors of its worth. In 1878 he was hired by Hans Schuyler of the US Electric Lighting Company in New York. As a further incentive, over and beyond his wages of $10 a day, Maxim was due a quarter share in anything he produced for the company. Aware of the inventor's work on gas machine lighting in Massachusetts, Schuyler placed him in charge of operations to produce electric light. Within a year Maxim had installed the first electrical "arc" lighting system in the Equitable Insurance Company building in New York.

Out of the arc

Arc lights worked by building up charge on a carbon rod until an "arc" of electricity crossed to a second rod. With sustained charge build-up, the arc sparked continuously, producing light. Arc lights wasted a great deal of energy and could be dangerous. It became a question of who would be first to find a way to channel current through a filament and sustain it without burnout.

Edison witnessed demonstrations of an early version of an unstable arc light in 1877, and in an interview with the New York Tribune in 1878, announced his intentions to design an incandescent lamp. When asked about the financial rewards of being the first man to make such a product, he replied: "I don't so much care for fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellow." He revealed that his platinum wire filament kept melting, and said, "I want to find something better." To help him in this quest, he founded his own fully staffed laboratory, complete with skilled glass blowers.

For all his rhetoric Edison had a lot of ground to make up. By 1878 Hiram Maxim had built a working light bulb using a filament made of carbon inside a bulb filled with gasoline vapour. The bulb stayed lit and did not burn out. Maxim applied for a patent on October 4 "on the principle of preserving and building up carbons in an incandescent lamp". If his application had been successful he would now be recognised as the official inventor of the light bulb. But he was to run into a quagmire of bureaucracy, bitter lawsuits and deliberate obstruction.