-
the first light bulb was created by Thomas Edison.
-
a year later in 1880 Thomas Edison began commercializing his incandescent light bulb
-
The next big change in the incandescent bulb came with the invention of the tungsten filament by European inventors in 1904.
-
In 1913, Irving Langmuir figured out that placing an inert gas like nitrogen inside the bulb doubled its efficiency.
-
By the late 1920s and early 1930s, European researchers were doing experiments with neon tubes coated with phosphors.
-
In 1974, researchers at Sylvania started investigating how they could miniaturize the ballast and tuck it into the lamp. While they developed a patent for their bulb, they couldn’t find a way to produce it feasibly. Two years later in 1976, Edward Hammer at General Electric figured out how to bend the fluorescent tube into a spiral shape, creating the first compact fluorescent light (CFL).
-
Since the 1990s, improvements in CFL performance, price, efficiency (they use about 75 percent less energy than incandescents) and lifetime (they last about 10 times longer) have made them a viable option for both renters and homeowners.
-
In 2000, the energy department partnered with private industry to push white led technology forward
-
in 2010, the department estimated that there were approximately 971 million 60-watt incandescent bulbs in use
-
today light bulbs are very different from the past and were come a long way from there, today we have fluorescent led and incandescent bulbs around but they last longer than ever