Who actually invented the light bulb

The answers to this seemingly simple question can be heard different. The Americans will undoubtedly insist that it was Edison. The British will say that this is their compatriot Svan. The French may recall the “Russian light” of the inventor Yablochkov, who began to illuminate the streets and squares of Paris in 1877. Someone will call another Russian inventor - Lodygin. There will probably be other answers. So who is right? Yes, perhaps that's all. The history of the light bulb represents a whole chain of discoveries and inventions made by different people at different times.

Before proceeding to the chronology of the invention of the light bulb, I would like to note what we mean by the term "light bulb". First of all, it is a light source, a device, a device in which the conversion of electrical energy into light occurs. But the conversion methods can be different. In the XIX century, several of these methods were known. Therefore, already then several types of electric lamps appeared: arc, incandescent and gas-discharge. An electric lamp is a technical system, i.e. the totality of the individual elements necessary to perform the main useful function - lighting.

The history of the appearance and development of an electric lamp is inseparable from the history of electrical engineering, which begins with the discovery of electric current in the 18th century. Later, in the 19th century, a wave of discoveries related to electricity swept across the world. A chain reaction began, as it were, when one discovery opened the way for the next. Electrical engineering from the branch of physics stood out as an independent science, the development of which was worked by a whole galaxy of scientists and inventors: Frenchman Andre-Marie Ampere (French Andre Marie Ampere), Germans Georg Om (German Georg Simon Ohm) and Heinrich Rudolf Hertz), the British Michael Faraday (Michael Faraday) and James Maxwell (James Maxwell) and others.

The amazing 19th century, which laid the foundations for the scientific and technological revolution that changed the world in this way, began with the invention galvanic cell - chemical current source (voltaic column). With this extremely important invention, the Italian scientist A. Volta celebrated the new 1800 year. And already in 1801, the professor at the St. Petersburg Medical and Surgical Academy, Vasily Petrov, managed to persuade his superiors to purchase for his physical cabinet a then-powerful electric battery, consisting of 4200 pairs of galvanic cells. Carrying out experiments with this battery, Petrov in 1802 discovered an electric arc - a bright discharge that arises between carbon rods-electrodes brought to a certain distance. He suggested using an arc for lighting.

However, in the practical implementation of this idea a lot of difficulties arose. The experiments showed that the arc burns brightly and steadily only at a certain distance between the electrodes. And during arc burning, carbon electrodes gradually burn out, increasing the arc gap. A regulator mechanism was required to maintain a constant distance between the electrodes.

Inventors have proposed different solutions. But they all had the disadvantage that it was impossible to turn on several lamps in one circuit. I had to use my own power source for each lamp. In 1856, the inventor A.I. Shpakovsky solved this problem by creating a lighting installation with eleven arc lamps equipped with original regulators. This installation illuminated Red Square in Moscow during the coronation of Alexander II.

In 1869, another Russian inventor V.I. Chikolev applied a differential regulator to an arc lamp and used it in powerful marine searchlights. Similar regulators are still used in large floodlight installations.Unfortunately, all arc burn controllers were unreliable and expensive.

The decisive role in the transition from experiments on electricity to mass electric lighting was played by the Russian electrical engineer Pavel Nikolayevich Yablochkov [1]. Yablochkov began his work in Russia, having organized in 1875 in St. Petersburg a workshop of physical devices. In the same year he came up with the idea to create a simple and reliable arc lamp. However, the financial collapse of the enterprise forced Yablochkov to leave for Paris in 1876, where he continued his work on an arc lamp at the famous Breguet watch and precision instrument manufacturer.

The problem was the same - I needed a regulator. The idea came as always unexpectedly. The case helped. Thinking hard about this problem, Yablochkov went to have a bite to eat in a small Parisian cafe. A waiter came. Yablochkov, continuing to think about his own, mechanically watched as he put down the dish, put down a spoon, fork, knife ... And suddenly ... Yablochkov rose sharply from the table and went to the door. He rushed to his workshop. Solution found! Simple and reliable! It came to him, as soon as he looked at the cutlery lying nearby, parallel to each other.

Yes, this is how carbon electrodes should be placed in the lamp - not horizontally, as in all previous designs, but in parallel (!). Then both will burn out exactly the same, and the distance between them will always be constant. And no complicated regulators are needed [2].

The Parisian waiter did not even suspect that he became, as it were, a co-author of the invention. But who knows, if he hadn’t put the knife and spoon so carefully before Yablochkov, the inventor might not have dawned on the inventor. True, the "tip" of the waiter found fertile ground. After all, Yablochkov was looking for his solution even at the cafe table, waiting for the order. By the way, this is a great example of the use of associative thinking in solving a complex technical problem. On the other hand, this case is an example of solving a technical problem, when the ideal device (in this case, the regulator) is that which is actually not there, but the functions are performed.

Of course, this was only an idea, and not a complete solution to the problem - to create an inexpensive and reliable lamp. It took a lot of work to achieve this. First of all, with a parallel arrangement of the electrodes, the arc can burn not only at the ends of the electrodes, but also along their entire length, and most likely, it will slide to their base - to the current-carrying clamps. This problem was solved by filling the space between the electrodes with an insulator, which gradually burned along with the electrodes.

The composition of this insulator still needed to be selected, which was done using clay (kaolin) for this. How to light a lamp? Then, at the top, between the electrodes was placed a thin coal jumper, which burned at the moment of switching on, igniting the arc. There was still the problem of uneven combustion of the electrodes associated with the polarity of the current. Because the electrode "+" burned faster, it initially had to be made thicker. Another ingenious solution to this problem was the use of alternating current.

The design of the arc lamp turned out to be simple: two coal rods separated by an insulating layer of kaolin and mounted on a simple stand, resembling a candlestick. The electrodes burned evenly, and the lamp gave a bright light, and for a sufficiently long time. Such an "electric candle" was easy to manufacture, and was cheap.

In 1876, a Russian inventor presented his invention at the London exhibition. And a year later, the enterprising Frenchman Deneyruz achieved the founding of the company "Society for the Study of Electric Lighting by the Methods of Yablochkov." Yablochkov’s lamps appeared in the most visited places in Paris, on Avenue de l'Oper and in the Place de la Opera, as well as in the Louvre store, dim gas and liquid lighting were replaced by matte balls that glowed with white, soft light. The triumphal procession of "La lumiere russe" (Russian light) around the world began.For two years, the candle Yablochkova conquered the whole Old World, spreading in the East to the palaces of the Persian Shah and King of Cambodia.

Fig. 1. Pavel Nikolaevich Yablochkov and his candle.

In the years 1876-77, several French patents were obtained, both for the design of the bulb itself and for their power supply systems. Production was put on an industrial basis. A small factory in Paris produced more than 8,000 candles per day and several dozen electric generators per month. Soon, however, all this prosperity came to an end. The Yablochkova candle began to be gradually replaced by a cheaper and more durable incandescent lamp.

It is believed that the inventor of an incandescent lamp is the famous American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (Thomas Alva Edison). On December 21, 1879, an article appeared in the New York Herald about the new invention of T.A. Edison - "Edison's light" (Edison's light), about an incandescent lamp with a carbon thread. A few days later, on January 1, 1880, 3 thousand people were present in Menlo Park (USA) at a demonstration of electric lighting for houses and streets. And on January 27 of that year he received US patent No. 223898 "Electric-Lamp" (see Fig. 2.). All this is so. But in reality, the story with this patent and with an incandescent lamp is much more complicated and interesting.

Fig. 2. Thomas A. Edison patent for an electric lamp

The first experiments with glowing conductors with electric current were carried out at the beginning of the 19th century by the English scientist Devi (Humphry Davy). One of the first attempts to apply incandescent conductors with current, specifically for the purpose of lighting, was carried out in 1844 by an engineer de Moleyn, who glowed a platinum wire placed inside a glass ball. These experiments did not bring the desired results, because platinum wire melted too quickly.

In 1845, in London, King replaced platinum with coal sticks and received a patent for the use of glowing metal and coal conductors for lighting.

In 1954, 25 years before Edison, the German watchmaker Heinrich Gebel presented in New York the first incandescent lamps with carbon filaments, suitable for practical use, with a burning time of about 200 hours. As a thread he used a charred bamboo thread 0.2 mm thick, placed in a vacuum. Instead of a flask, Goebel, for reasons of economy, first used bottles of cologne, and later glass tubes. He created a vacuum in a glass flask by filling and pouring mercury, that is, using the method used in the manufacture of barometers.

Goebel used the created lamps for lighting his watch shop. To improve his financial situation, he traveled around New York in a wheelchair and invited everyone to look at the stars through a telescope. The stroller, at the same time, was decorated with its bulbs. Thus, Goebel became the first person to use light for advertising purposes. Due to the lack of money and connections, the German emigrant could not get a patent for his lamp with coal thread, and his invention was quickly forgotten.

Since 1872, Alexander Nikolaevich Lodygin began in St. Petersburg experiments on electric lighting. In his first lamps between the massive copper rods located in a hermetically sealed glass ball, a thin wand of coal was clamped. Despite the imperfection of the lamp in the same year, the banker Kozlov, in partnership with Lodygin, founded a society for the operation of this invention. The Academy of Sciences awarded Lodygin Lomonosov Prize of 1,000 rubles.

The incandescent bulbs built by Lodygin with a coal rod in 1874 were used to illuminate the St. Petersburg Admiralty. In 1875, Cohn became the head of the partnership, producing under his own name the improved Lodygin lamp designed by V.F.Didrichson. In this lamp, the coals were placed in a vacuum, and the burnt ember was automatically replaced by another.Three such lamps were illuminated for two months in 1875 by Florent's linen store in St. Petersburg, and also, at the suggestion of P. Struve, the caissons were illuminated under water during the construction of the Alexander bridge across the Neva.

In 1875, Didrichson began to make coals of wood by carbonizing wood cylinders without air in graphite crucibles covered in coal powder. In 1876, after the death of Kohn, the partnership fell apart. Further improvement of the lamp was made by N.P. Bulygin in 1876. In his lamp, the end of a long coal glowed, which automatically moved out as its end burned. The design of the lamps was not easy and low-tech to manufacture, and therefore not cheap, although it was constantly improved.

At the end of the 70s of the same century, ships were built for one of the North American shipyards for Russia, and when it was time to receive them, the lieutenant of the Russian fleet A.N. Khotinsky went there. He took with him several Lodygin incandescent lamps. The invention was already patented in France, Russia, Belgium, Austria and the UK. He showed Russian lamps to an inventor named Thomas Edison, who at that time was also working on the problem of electric lighting.

Now it is difficult to establish how much the described circumstance influenced Edison's invention. However, in the end, thanks to his work, a quantum leap was made in the improvement of incandescent lamps. Edison did not make any revolutionary changes to Lodygin's bulb. His lamp was a glass flask with coal thread, from which air was pumped out, though much more thoroughly than Lodygin's. But the merit of Edison, primarily in the fact that he invented and created a supersystem for this lamp and put its production on stream, which led to a significant reduction in cost. He came up with a screw base for the lamp and a cartridge for it, invented fuses, switches, the first energy meter. It was with Edison’s light bulb that electric lighting became really massive, coming to the homes of ordinary people.

Edison's approach to solving the problem of finding material for an incandescent filament deserves special attention. He simply went through exhaustive search of all substances and materials available to him (trial and error method). Edison tried 6,000 carbon-containing substances, from ordinary charcoal sewing threads to food and tar. The best was the bamboo from which the case of the Japanese palm fan was made. This titanic work took about two years [3].

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in England, at about the same time as Lodygin and Edison, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan worked on a light bulb. As an element of glow, he used carbonized cotton thread and also pumped air out of the bulb. Swan received a British patent for his device in 1878, about a year before Edison. Starting in 1879, he began installing electric lamps in English homes. Having organized the company "The Swan Electric Light Company" in 1881, he began the commercial production of lamps. Later, Swan teamed up with Edison to commercialize the single Edi-Swan brand.

It follows from the foregoing that an electric incandescent lamp at the very early stage had several inventors. Almost all of them had patents. As for the most famous of them, Edison's US patent, it was declared invalid by the court until the expiration of the protection rights. The court acknowledged that the incandescent lamp was invented by Heinrich Goebel several decades before Edison.

In 1890, Lodygin patented in the USA a lamp with a metal thread made of refractory metals - osmium, iridium, rhodium, molybdenum and tungsten. Lodygin lamps with molybdenum filament were exhibited at the Paris exhibition in 1900 and were so successful that in 1906 the American company General Electric bought this patent from him.The most interesting thing is that the company "General Electric" was organized by Thomas Edison himself. The correspondence dispute between the great inventors was over.

However, the improvement of the incandescent lamp did not end there. Since 1909 incandescent lamps with a zigzag-mounted tungsten filament began to be used, and in 1912–13 lamps appeared filled with nitrogen and inert gases (Ar, Kr). And finally, the last improvement of the beginning of the 20th century - tungsten filament began to be made, first, in the form of a spiral, and then in the form of a bispiral (spiral wound from a spiral) and tri-spiral. The electric incandescent lamp finally took on the form we were used to seeing.

So who invented the light bulb? The names have already been named: Petrov, Shpakovsky, Chikolev, Yablochkov, Edison, Devi, King, Gebel, Lodygin, Svan. It would seem enough. But if we take the “Brockhaus and Efron Small Encyclopedic Dictionary” published at the beginning of the 20th century, then you can read: Incandescent bulbs represent a glass cap from which air is pumped out, and where carbon or metal filament heated by electric current is placed. Coal is obtained by charring bamboo fibers (Edison bulbs), silk, cotton paper (Swan bulbs). Since the late 1890s new incandescent bulbs appeared: instead of a carbon filament, a rod pressed from fire-resistant substances is subjected to incandescence: magnesia, thorium, zirconium and yttrium (a Nernst bulb) or a thread of metal osmium (Auer bulbs) and tantalum (Bolton and Feuerlein bulbs).

Apparently, new names appeared - Nernst, Auer, Bolton, Feuerlane. If you wish, having carried out a more in-depth search, this list can still be replenished.

It is probably pointless to look for a definite answer to the question “Who invented the light bulb”. Many inventors put their mind, knowledge, work and talent to it. And this applies only to the types of bulbs that were developed at the initial stage of the introduction of electric lighting: arc and incandescent.

Even at the very beginning of the development of incandescent lamps, it was noticed that they have low efficiency, i.e. a very small percentage of the energy of electric current passes into light energy. Therefore, the search continued for other ways of converting electric energy into light, and attempts were made to use them in new types of electric light sources. Such light sources were gas-discharge lamps - devices in which electrical energy is converted into optical radiation when electric current passes through gases and other substances (for example, mercury).

The first experiments with gas discharge lamps began almost simultaneously with incandescent lamps. In 1860, the first mercury discharge lamps appeared in England. However, until the beginning of the 20th century, all these experiments were few in number and remained only experiments, without real practical application.

In the first decade of the 20th century, during the period of mass introduction of electric lighting using incandescent lamps, work on gas discharge lamps was intensified, which led to a number of inventions and discoveries. In 1901, Peter Cooper Hewitt invented a low-pressure mercury lamp. In 1906, a high-pressure mercury lamp was invented. 1910 - opening of the halogen cycle. The neon lamp was developed by the French physicist Georges Claude in 1911 and quickly found use in advertising.

In the 20s and 40s, work on discharge lamps continued in many countries, which led to the improvement of already known types of lamps and to the discovery of new ones. Were developed: low pressure sodium lamp, fluorescent lamp, xenon lamp and others. In the 40s began the massive use of fluorescent lamps for lighting.

Later, other types of electric llamas were invented: high pressure sodium; halogen; compact luminescent; LED light sources and others. Now in the world the total number of types of light sources is about 2000 [4].

Despite such a huge number of types of electric lamps, inventive thought does not stand still. Already known light sources continue to improve. An example of such an improvement is the creation in 1983 of compact fluorescent lamps, which became the size of an ordinary incandescent lamp. They do not require special starting equipment to turn them on, they are connected to a standard cartridge for incandescent lamps, and most importantly, with the same amount of light generated, these lamps consume several times less electricity and last several times longer. In recent years, such energy-saving bulbs are increasingly used, despite their still greater cost than traditional incandescent bulbs.

However, inventive thought does not stop there. Almost simultaneously, two American firms Technical Consumer Products (TCP) and O · ZONELite launched fluorescent energy-saving light bulbs with unexpected new properties. According to these manufacturers, their Fresh2 [5] and O · ZONELite [6] bulbs (both names are registered trademarks), in addition to lighting the room, also eliminate unpleasant odors, purify the air, kill bacteria, viruses and fungi. Isn't it a miracle?

The secret is that the bulbs are coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2), which when exposed to fluorescent light produces a photocatalytic reaction. In the course of this reaction, negatively charged particles — electrons — are released, and positively charged “holes” remain in their place. Due to the appearance of a combination of pluses and minuses on the surface of the bulb, the water molecules contained in the air turn into very strong oxidizing agents - hydroxide radicals (HO), which is why these bulbs have such unusual and wonderful properties.

Fig. 3. Fresh2 and O • ZONELite gas-discharge fluorescent energy-saving lamps

As can be seen from Figure 3, these bulbs are even very similar in appearance, and their characteristics are approximately the same. The spiral shape of both lamps is noteworthy. Their creators did this to increase light output, just like their predecessors - the creators of incandescent lamps. Indeed, history moves in a spiral.

It can be concluded that gas discharge lamps in recent years are gaining more and more popularity even in domestic lighting, displacing incandescent lamps. They consume less energy, are also easy to operate and can still have a number of wonderful and useful properties. The higher price, which still restrains the distribution of these lamps, is offset by 8-10 times the service life and 3-5 times the efficiency. And with more mass production, the price will gradually decline. And if we take into account the ever-increasing energy and environmental problems, which cause an increase in the cost of electricity and forcing tough measures to be taken, it will become clear that the prospects for compact fluorescent lamps are the most promising. And in the coming years they have practically no alternative.

But, nothing stands still. Although the last 100 years in the development of lighting technology have passed under the victorious march of gas-discharge lamps, other types of light sources have also appeared. The most promising direction now seems to be the use of LED light sources, as they have even greater efficiency than discharge lamps.

The first industrial LEDs appeared in the 60s of the XX century. However, the small power did not allow them to be used for lighting. They have found application as indicators in various electronic devices, in particular, microcalculators, watches and other household and scientific devices.

It would have continued like this if mankind had not encountered the problem of energy conservation. It turned out that to date, LEDs have the highest percentage conversion of electrical energy into light energy. It was impossible not to try to use LEDs as light sources. They found, initially, application in manual electric flashlights. In addition, these were small flashlights that did not shine very much, but were miniature, which allowed them to be used even as trinkets.

Of course, LED bulbs have many more problems. Many of them are being successfully resolved, especially since large capital is investing a lot of money in this direction. And success is already evident - energy-saving LED lamps have already appeared on sale.