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Humphry Davy invents first electric light.
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James Bowman Lindsay created a prototype lightbulb that had constant lighting.
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Edward Shepard uses charcoal filiment to create an incandescent arc lamp.
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Henricg Globel, a German watchmaker, invented the first true lightbulb. He used a carbonized bamboo filament placed inside a glass bulb.
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Herman Sprengel invented the mercury vacuum pump making it possible to develop a practical electric light bulb.
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Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans patented a lightbulb.
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Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914), an English physicist, was the first person to invent a practical and longer-lasting electic lightbulb (13.5 hours). Swan used a carbon fiber filament derived from cotton.
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Thomas Alva Edison invented a carbon filament from cotton that burned for 13.5 hours. Edison placed his filament in an oxygenless bulb. (Edison evolved his designs for the lightbulb based on the 1875 patent he purchased from inventors, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans.) Seperately, Joseph Wilson Swan invented the same thing the same year.
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Edison continued to improve his lightbulb until it could last for over 1200 hours using a bamboo-derived filament.
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Willis Whitney invented a filament that would not make the inside of a lightbulb turn dark. It was a metal-coated carbon filament (a predecessor to the tungsten filament).
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The General Electric Company were the first to patent a method of making tungsten filaments for use in incandesent lightbulbs. The filaments were costly.
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William David Coolidge (1873-1975) invented an improved method of making tungsten filaments. The tungsten filament outlasted all other types of filaments because of its high melting point and low evaporation rate and because Coolidge made the costs practical.
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The first frosted lightbulbs were produced.
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Philips invented a lightbulb that lasts 60,000 hours. The bulb uses magnetic induction.
