Invention of incandescent light bulb

The incandescent light bulb was made practical in 1879, when the American inventor Thomas Edison and his team at Menlo Park, New Jersey, tested a bulb with a carbonised filament in a vacuum glass globe that glowed for many hours. They then found that carbonised bamboo lasted longer, and Edison went on to build a whole system of generators, wiring and sockets to supply electric light, opening his first central power station in New York in 1882. In Britain, Joseph Swan had been developing a similar lamp and demonstrated one at about the same time, and the two men later merged their British interests. Earlier inventors, including Humphry Davy, had made electric lamps that were not practical. In the early twentieth century, tungsten filaments made bulbs brighter and more efficient.

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