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Who invented the incandescent electric light bulb?

JacksinPA

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A member who I believe is from the U.K. made the statement in a post yesterday (that I have been unable to find) that Edison stole the light bulb invention from a British inventor named Swan. I am currently reading The Papers of Thomas Edison & will shortly be reading about Swan's involvement here. There was at least one other inventor in this mix, Hiram Maxim.
 

Sounds like something the Commies would claim. "We build first"

Corning, the first makers of the light bulb used a filament developed by Edison.

https://www.cmog.org/article/genie-bottle-glass-bulbs-tv-tubes
 
WCH said:
Sounds like something the Commies would claim. "We build first"

Corning, the first makers of the light bulb used a filament developed by Edison.

https://www.cmog.org/article/genie-bottle-glass-bulbs-tv-tubes
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I'm reading at the moment where Edison had 2 lamp factories in 1881,. one in Menlo Park, NJ & one in Harrison, near Newark. This was in early 1881. Corning Glass supplied the glass tubes that his glass blowers would transform into the bulbs. This guy Swan doesn't appear for at least another hundred pages.
 

It is likely Edison perfected an earlier design....

Often the original invention of an item is credited to the people who market the item or perfect the item.
 
WCH said:
Like the AK-47...good job Soviets.
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nuclear ice brakers, space stations, the first satellite...invention was never their problem. They just never figured out how to efficiently manufacture and bring their new toys to the market.
 

The question isn't who came up with the idea, but who made it a workable idea. The ancient Greeks had the idea of steam engines, but they weren't workable for anything useful. So while Hero may come up with the idea around the 1st cnetury, it was Jerónimo de Ayanz 1600 years later who designed a workable version of a steam engine. Edison took a concept and put in the massive effort to make it a reality.
 
Edison did not really invent the light bulb, he created the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

Edison did not start to work seriously on the light bulb until 1878 and bought a lot of patents from others working on the light bulb from years before 1880
 
 
calamity said:
nuclear ice brakers, space stations, the first satellite...invention was never their problem. They just never figured out how to efficiently manufacture and bring their new toys to the market.
Click to expand...

They must have stolen German scientists also.
 
The Scots are fond of claiming that John Logie Baird "invented television decades prior to the Americans".
Baird's idea was borrowed from Paul Nipkow, and both inventions consisted of huge spinning metal disks which yielded dim neon lit squiggly images the size of a postage stamp with about 30 vertical lines of resolution.
Spinning disk cameras were too large to move, thus it was only possible to perform in front of a single camera only under surgical level hot lights, and it was nearly impossible to keep the spinning disk on the camera synchronized with the disks on the receiving sets.

The American invention used an all electronic image pickup tube called an iconoscope, developed by a Russian born American inventor. Vladimir Zworykin filed "two patents for a Television system" in 1923 and 1925. He also invented a corresponding "cathode ray tube" with a lot of help from the work of Kenjiro Takayanagi, who first demonstrated a working CRT in 1925.

Takayanagi's CRT however, was used to receive images output by mechanical scanning disk cameras.
Practical electronic television seems to be a culminating effort based on work by Zworykin, Takayanagi and Philo Farnsworth with additional inspiration by a Hungarian inventor named Kálmán Tihanyi.
RCA had to pay Farnsworth a million dollars to settle a patent interference suit between Farnsworth and Zworykin, in order to use the system in commercial broadcasting.

Most complex inventions often have several originators, and a handful of inventors who assimilate design concepts inspired by prior work and come up with a practical version for widespread application.

Similar tales of collaboration and improvements on original designs and concepts also abound when talking about the first inventors of videotape.
If you are describing images laid down on magnetic tape by stationary heads, then credit goes to the Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus developed in 1952 by the BBC, however a 21 inch reel of steel tape moving at 200 inches per second was not only impractical, it was even a bit dangerous.

Competing helical* and tranverse** (quadrature) scanning systems were developed by Toshiba* and Ampex** in 1953 and 1956 respectively. This allowed the use of standard magnetic tape running at dramatically slower speeds.
 
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WCH said:
They must have stolen German scientists also.
Click to expand...

Historically it was the other way around, starting in the 1800's and ending in 1936 or so.
 
WCH said:
Like the AK-47...good job Soviets.
Click to expand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kalashnikov died 5 years ago. Great engineering job. A good friend who was an officer in the 'Nam brought one back with him & my nephew has one locked away in his parent's condo. I think you can still buy one. Great for terrorizing the neighborhood: just sit on your front porch & clean & oil it for all to see.
 

That's not quite true. While Swan invented the light bulb, what Edison did was find a material to make it longer lasting, and feasible to actually use.
 
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