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December 31: Bright Idea Day, anniversary of Edison’s light bulb

December 31, 2010 10:59 am

100,000 people gather in Times Square, New York City, tonight, and millions more around the world, in festivities for the new year made possible by the work of Thomas Alva Edison.

Here it is, the invention that stole sleep from our grasp, made clubbing possible, and launched 50,000 cartoons about ideas:

The light bulb Thomas Edison demonstrated on December 31, 1879, at Menlo Park, New Jersey - Wikimedia image (GFDL)

The light bulb. It’s an incandescent bulb.

It wasn’t the first bulb. Edison a few months earlier devised a bulb that worked with a platinum filament. Platinum was too expensive for mass production, though — and Edison wanted mass production. So, with the cadre of great assistants at his Menlo Park laboratories, he struggled to find a good, inexpensive filament that would provide adequate life for the bulb. By late December 1879 they had settled on carbon filament.

Edison invited investors and the public to see the bulb demonstrated, on December 31, 1879.

Thomas Edison in 1878, the year before he demonstrated a workable electric light bulb. CREDIT: Thomas Edison, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing left, 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction number LC-USZ62-98067

Edison’s successful bulb indicated changes in science, technology, invention, intellectual property and finance well beyond its use of electricity. For example:

• Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, offices and laboratory were financed with earlier successful inventions. It was a hive of inventive activity aimed to make practical inventions from advances in science. Edison was all about selling inventions and rights to manufacture devices. He always had an eye on the profit potential. His improvements on the telegraph would found his laboratory he thought, and he expected to sell the device to Western Union for $5,000 to $7,000. Instead of offering it to them at a price, however, he asked Western Union to bid on it. They bid $10,000, which Edison gratefully accepted, along with the lesson that he might do better letting the marketplace establish the price for his inventions. Other inventive labs followed Edison’s example, such as the famous Bell Labs, but few equalled his success, or had as much fun doing it.  (Economics teachers:  Need an example of the marketplace in action?)
• While Edison had some financial weight to invest in the quest for a workable electric light, he also got financial support, $30,000 worth, from some of the finance giants of the day, including J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts who established the Edison Light Company.
• Edison didn’t invent the light bulb — but his improvements on it made it commercial. “In addressing the question ‘Who invented the incandescent lamp?’ historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison’s version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.”
• Edison’s financial and business leadership acumen is partly attested to by the continuance of his organizations, today — General Electric, one of the world’s most successful companies over the past 40 years, traces its origins to Edison.

Look around yourself this evening, and you can find a score of ways that Edison’s invention and its descendants affect your life. One of the more musing effects is in cartooning, however. Today a glowing lightbulb is universally accepted as a nonverbal symbol for ideas and inventions. (See Mark Parisi’s series of lightbulb cartoons, “Off the Mark.”)

Even with modern, electricity-saving bulbs, the cartoon shorthand hangs on, as in this Mitra Farmand cartoon.

Brilliant cartoon from Mitra Farmand, Fuffernutter

Or see this wonderful animation, a video advertisement for United Airlines, by Joanna Quinn for Fallon — almost every frame has the symbolic lightbulb in it.

Other resources:

• New Netherlands Institute biography of Edison
• A timeline noting Edison’s many inventions
• Light bulbs and other electric lamps, and color
• Earlier post at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub on the granting of the patent for Edison’s invention
• The 100+ year-old lightbulb in Livermore, California
• Forth Worth’s 100-year-old lightbulb (If there are two lightbulbs more than 100 years old and still burning, are there others?)

Thomas Edison's electric lamp patent drawing and claim for the incandescent light bulb CREDIT: “New Jersey--The Wizard of Electricity--Thomas A. Edison's System of Electric Illumination,” 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-97960.

Yeah, this is mostly an encore post.

Posted by Ed Darrell

Categories: Creativity, Economics, Electricity, Gilded Age, Historic documents, History, History of Science, Invention, Patents, Progressive Era, Science, Technology

Tags: 1879, Bright Idea Day, Creativity, December 31, Economics, Electric Light Bulb, Electricity, Gilded Age, History, Inventions, Patents, Progressive Era, Science, Technology, Thomas Edison

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7 Responses to “December 31: Bright Idea Day, anniversary of Edison’s light bulb”

1. […] December 31, 1879: Edison demonstrated the lightbulb to investors and the public (includes links to patent images for the bulb) Advertisement Eco World Content From Across The Internet. Featured on EcoPressed How Chinese Babies Pay the Price for Chinese Pollution Share this:TwitterFacebookRedditDiggStumbleUponLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in Capitalism, Economics, Entrepreneurship, History, Invention, Science, Technology and tagged Economics, History, Inventions, Light Bulb, Science, Technology, Thomas Edison by Ed Darrell. Bookmark the permalink. […]

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   By Annals of entrepreneurship: Edison’s improved lightbulb works! October 21, 1879 | Mr. Darrell's Pin Factory on October 21, 2011 at 3:14 pm

2. […] December 31, 1879: Edison demonstrated the lightbulb to investors and the public (includes links to patent images for the bulb) Advertisement Eco World Content From Across The Internet. Featured on EcoPressed How Chinese Babies Pay the Price for Chinese Pollution Share this information:TwitterDiggFacebookStumbleUponRedditEmailLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. […]

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   By Edison gets the light bulb right, October 31, 1879 « Mr. Darrell's Wayback Machine on October 21, 2011 at 1:57 pm

3. […] December 31, 1879:  Edison demonstrated the lightbulb to investors and the public (includes links to patent images for the bulb) Advertisement Eco World Content From Across The Internet. Featured on EcoPressed Get ready for another new recycling label system Share this:TwitterStumbleUponDiggRedditFacebookEmailLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. […]

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   By Bright idea day, October 21 – Edison’s demonstration of the light bulb « Millard Fillmore's Bathtub on October 21, 2011 at 1:13 pm

4. Tell it to the Library of Congress. Maybe it’s sorta like baseball: You describe the photograph from the viewer’s point of view.

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   By Ed Darrell on December 31, 2010 at 4:44 pm

5. Why is he facing left? Looks right to me.

   Jonathan

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   By jd2718 on December 31, 2010 at 4:12 pm

6. […] Vanunu easily obtained the keys to the restricted areas after they had been carelessly left in the shower room by a supervisor. Vanunu shot two rolls of film in the underground WMD facility without Related to this you can read: https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/december-31-bright-idea-day-anniversary-of-edisons-light-… […]

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   By Atomic Bomb Footage | The Vanunu Saga: 2008 on December 31, 2010 at 12:08 pm

7. Hats off to the minds that helped make this country great!

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   By Robert Barton on December 31, 2010 at 11:47 am

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