Artificial light from a light bulb has entered our daily lives so tightly that we have stopped even noticing how important this invention is.
We can only assess its necessity occasionally, during a brief power outage, and if it happens in the evening when it is dark. At such moments, it is usually said that there is no light
History is sometimes unfair. The everyday household appliance used, which is essential for every person and all mankind, is neither a name nor a legend of creation, nor a reminder of the creator. But thanks to a single person in our homes lighted an electric bulb and for many years filled the house with heat and light.It is said that the inventor of the electric light bulb spent a huge amount of time on its invention. He had to do about 2,000 experiments before a prototype of a household light bulb with an incandescent spiral was born.
Russian mentality
The story of an ordinary light bulb or, to put it scientifically, incandescent lamps are very similar to the stories of many other inventions made in Russia. Back in 1872, the Russian scientist Alexander Lodygin managed to make the coal rod in a glass vessel with pumped airglow. The year 1874. Russian engineer Alexander Lodygin received a patent for the invention of an electric coal bulb. A little later, he suggested replacing the coal rod with tungsten, which is still used today in electric light bulbs.
But to create a reliable, durable and inexpensive bulb, and also, to establish its production was only able to establish an American Thomas Edison in 1878. By the way, in his first bulbs in the role of the luminous incandescent filament was charred chips of Japanese bamboo. The tungsten filaments we are accustomed to appeared much later - at the initiative of the Russian engineer Lodygin mentioned above.
American practicality
The American mentality of the Russian is not related. Thomas Edison, a citizen of the United States, had everything in hand: thinking of how to make the telegraph tape more durable, he invented the waxing of paper. Such paper was then used as a candy wrapper.
Edison's appearance was predisposed to seven centuries of Western history. Not only and not so much as the history of invention as the historically formed active attitude to life. Many geniuses of technical thought went to the point that in 1847 in the small American town of Port Heron was born Thomas Alva Edison. This "Napoleon of invention" would not have happened without the fundamental works of Faraday in physics. In his self-realization played a role that for many, the most audacious idea of the young inventor instantly found investors willing to risk their money. Thus, while still a teenager from a poor neighborhood, Edison planned to print a newspaper right in the train Port Heron-Detroit on the move and sell it to passengers, collecting at stops local news. Immediately, some people had lent money to the daredevil to buy a tiny printing press and others who had let him and the press into the luggage car.
Before Edison, the inventions were either made by scientists, for whom they were a by-product of their discoveries, or by practitioners who had improved what they were working with. It was the "Wizard of Menlo Park" who turned invention into an independent profession. It spread from ideas, and almost every development became a sprout for many subsequent, in turn requiring development. All his long life Edison did not care about personal comfort - when he visited Europe in the zenith of fame, he was very disappointed with the dandy and laziness of the inventors there.
Edison built a small power plant for his lab in Menlo Park, New York, but the energy was more than he needed, and the inventor agreed to sell it to his neighborhood farmers. These people did not realize that they were the first paid consumers of electricity in the world. Edison never wanted to be an entrepreneur, but often needed something to do his job, he started a small business in Menlo Park, which later grew to a huge scale and went his way of development.
Edison was pushed up by the mighty spirit of American capitalism. He got rich at the age of 22 when he invented a quote ticker for the Boston Stock Exchange. His greatest invention was the electric light bulb, thanks to which he managed to electrify the whole of America, and then the whole world.