Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America’s greatest inventor. He developed many devices in fields such as power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and movies.
On October 21st in 1978, Thomas Edison invented the electric incandescent lamp. The most important thing about the lamp was that it would last 13 1/2 hours before it would burn out. Thomas Edison began developing a practical incandescent lamp in earnest, and Edison filed his first patent application for “Improvements in Electric Lights.
However, he continued to test various types of metallic filament materials to improve on his original design and filed another US patent in 4,444 for an electric lamp in which “a carbon filament or strip is wound and connected to platinum contact wires.
Although the patent described various ways of making carbon filament, including the use of “cotton and linen threads, wooden rails, papers wound in various ways,” it was not until a few months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a charred bamboo filament could last more than 1200 hours.
This discovery marked the beginning of commercially manufactured light bulbs and, in 1880, Thomas Edison’s company, Edison Electric Light Company, began marketing their new product.
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