When we talk about incandescent light bulbs, one name often comes to mind for people who have attended a physics and chemistry class in middle school: Thomas Edison .
However, one only has to go through Google to have doubts about his status as the inventor of this technology. So if it is not him, who is at the origin of the latter? Let's focus on this question.
First patent filing by Joseph Swann
Many households cannot part with the incandescent light bulb, even though it has been banned from production since 2012. This is normal, because the technology has accompanied them for at least three generations. As a reminder, it has existed since the second half of the 19th century .
Although we were always taught at school that it was an invention of Thomas Edison, things are more complicated in reality. In fact, the first patent filed on the subject was not by him, but by a British inventor named Joseph Swann .
It was made in 1878 and concerns an incandescent light bulb based on carbon filaments, the result of a quarter of a century of work on the electric light bulb.
Joseph Swann was also the first person to be able to light his house entirely with electricity . It was not until some time later that a public establishment, the Savoy Theatre in London, benefited from the same technology with a lighting system consisting of 1200 electric lamps.
Joseph Swann could not claim to have invented the electric light bulb. That belonged to his compatriot Bowman Lindsay , who had already invented a prototype of a very low-power electric light bulb in 1835.
This only gave the possibility of reading a book at about 500 cm. Joseph Swann, however, has the merit of improving his work by integrating it.
Thomas Edison, the greatest player in the development of technology .
Should we therefore relegate Thomas Edison to the rank of impostor? It is difficult to be categorical in answering this question. It is nevertheless necessary to recall that the patent application made a year later by the "inventor" that we discovered on the school bench concerned an electric bulb with a bamboo filament from Japan.
So, basically, it was a different technology . It was unfortunately "short-lived", the first bulb that came out of it burned out in just 30 hours.
This incident did not, however, encourage Thomas Edison to push his arms, quite the contrary. He worked hard for 3 years to be able to create the first carbon filament light bulb with a durability of 1000 hours . But as you must already be telling yourself, it is an improved version of Swann's invention.
With such a feat, however, it was not difficult for Thomas Edison to put the latter in the shade and thus to attribute to himself the posterity of the technology. Joseph Swann did not seem, moreover, to want at all costs to contest this status of inventor of the incandescent lamp .
He even agreed to join forces with Thomas Edison to create the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company, a company that became Siemens Ediswan several decades later. Regardless, both men, like Bowman Lindsay, will forever mark the history of electricity.
Thomas Edison, the Bill Gates of electricity
In terms of ambition, moreover, Edison had more than Swann. And he was the first to exploit technology to build an empire . This was reflected in particular:
- By concluding a commercial agreement giving him the possibility of exploiting in the United States the improvements made by Joseph Swann. At the same time, Edison took away from the latter a determination for the claim of paternity of the invention.
- By the American proposal of the incandescent lamp within a complete package also including:
- Standardization of electrical networks
- Wiring system
- Current generator
Among the components of this pack, there are some that are still essential to us today. This is the case of the E27 screw base.
For his ability to turn technological inventions into a significant source of wealth, Edison is often compared to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, among others.
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