When Edison announced his invention of a commercially feasible light bulb were there other inventors on the brink of doing the same?
It’s hard to believe that Edison alone came up with the idea of a filament burning in a vacuum inside a glass bulb, or that he could have kept his work a secret for the entire time he was working on it, but I suppose that’s possible…
It was a technical, not a conceptual problem.
Think of Edison’s lab as a bit like the early days of Microsoft.
It’s not that he was so much smarter than everybody, though he was smart.
But Edison was thinking of new things, things people hadn’t thought of before.
Nobody had really done extensive filament testing- early electric lights blew out in seconds, people shrugged, then moved on.
Edison went through every possible substance a filament could be made of in a very methodical fashion.
(and that’s just one invention- his lab is credited with hundreds or thousands)
Not only was Edison not alone in “inventing” a viable light bulb, he was beaten to it, and (as with many of his purported inventions) to a large extent he plagiarized it, and claimed the credit (and made most of the money) for what was mostly another’s work: Joseph Swan.
Humphry Davy demonstrated the first use of electricity for lighting; and there were many others, but as Njtt says, it was Swan who first demonstrated a working bulb in 1878 and that wiki says he was using glass bulbs from 1850. His house, still standing, was the first house lit by electricity, and Newcastle’s Mosley St. where he had a workshop the first lit street.
It was like he was *sweating *the details.
Edison was a smart individual but his real contribution was building a modern research lab. Lots of people knew the concept of a light bulb and were working on developing the details - but they were generally working as individuals. Edison succeeded because he had a lab with dozens of technicians working simultaneously.
And , equally important, was much more methodical in his methods than most inventors.
But it was his lab that allowed him to be methodical. If he had been working alone it would have taken him decades to do all the tests he planned on. Which shows why lone inventors can’t afford to be methodical - they have to hope that luck and inspiration will give them the answer before they die of old age. Edison’s team approach was what made it possible to do a methodical search in a reasonable amount of time.
Davy’s electric light was an arc light, and thus worked on a completely different principle from the incandescent bulb that is still used in household lighting today. Swan (and much less Edison) was by no means the first person to demonstrate the principle of the incandescent bulb in the laboratory, but he was the first to develop the idea into a form that was sufficiently reliable and cheap as to be a successful commercial product. Edison got to a similar point, partially but not entirely independently, a little later, but falsely claimed the credit for being the original inventor.
I believe Edison can correctly be credited with inventing the phonograph, but most of the other things he claimed to have invented, very much including the light bulb, were in fact first invented by others and merely tweaked a little in Edison’s laboratory (and even then, any improvements often owed much more to both the inspiration and perspiration of Edison’s employees than to those of the man himself). Edison’s fame is due more to his being a more ruthless businessman and a much better self-publicist than the people who really invented most of the relevant products. Even then, in the case of the light bulb, he ended up going into partnership with Swan in order to gain access to aspects of Swan’s technology which were superior to anything Edison managed to get developed in his own labs.
Also, of course, unlike most of his rivals, Edison was an American, and thus was the first to invent a practical light bulb in much the same sense as Lindbergh was the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, or John Glenn* was the first man, and Sally Ride the first woman, in space (i.e., they were not first at all, but were the first Americans to do it**).
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*When I was a kid, it was Alan Shepard, not John Glenn, who was the first American (though still not the first man) in space. I don’t really know why he got virtually written out of history. Somehow, if you don’t actually get to do a full orbit, and then have a political career, it does not count, I guess. Alternatively, perhaps there is some good reason why what Shepard did should not really count as truly getting into space, but the American propaganda machine at the time put it about that he had done so just in case that was as far as the US space program was able to get before the Russians did something more spectacular again.
**OK, I know, in Lindbergh’s case, at least, he can be made out as first in something by suitable gerrymandering of what the achievement is supposed to be: like it does not count if there are two people in the plane, or if you land in Ireland rather than in France, or if your name has “cock” in it.
There was a complicated dynamic between the two men. They were sort of like John Lennon and Paul McCartney - both incredibly talented but they appealed to different people. Shepard was Lennon - his supporters saw him as the more interesting person. Glenn was McCartney - his supporters saw him as the more straightforward person. And the supporters of one man would downplay the virtues of the other - Shepard wasn’t interesting, he was moody; Glenn wasn’t straightforward, he was bland. It could even turn negative - people said that Shepard put himself ahead of the good of the space program or Glenn was crafting his image for public approval.
OK, but that does not explain why most Americans these days seem to believe that Glenn, not Shepard, was the first American in space, despite the claims made at the time of Shepard’s mission. It would seem to be a fairly objective issue that does not depend on how likeable people may have found one or the other.
Well, part of it is that Glenn’s flight was into orbit while Shepard’s was basically an “up and down” flight. The orbit may have received, over time, more mindshare from the general public.
(Missed the edit window) Also, there was film of Glenn in the cabin in-flight (and not for Shepard?) that may have etched itself into people’s memory.
I think you’re correct in your criticisms of Edison but are still not accurately covering the whole issue. If anything the worst part of Edison’s legacy is that he’s remembered as an inventor, that’s actually not a positive, but a negative. Edison was much more than an inventor. By and large both in the 19th and 20th century many of the inventors of things were basically smart, talented, hobbyist tinkerers. The real importance isn’t who invented something first but who actually makes it work in a meaningful way the first time.
Take for example the light bulb, neither Joseph Swan or Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. Swan certainly did more on the bulb earlier than Edison, and I’ll actually defend Edison a bit here. Edison did claim in the American press to be inventor of the light bulb for moneymaking reasons, but he can’t really be said to have plagiarized Swan’s light bulb. Him and Swan came to an agreement on the matter and eventually formed a joint venture. It is certainly true Edison copied Swan, but it isn’t like he gave Swan the short end of the stick.
The real important innovation by Swan was his filament design, he was the first to make a carbon fiber filament derived from cotton. This is what Edison blatantly copied, but it was Edison’s team that tested enough materials to find the bamboo derived carbon filament, which had a practical life of around 1200 hours versus the 13.5 hours of Swan’s light. For obvious reasons a 13.5 hour life light bulb is far less commercially relevant than one with 1,200 hours of life. Unlike many inventors Swan did continue to improve his bulb (and even made later innovations that were copied by other bulb makers), and did actually incorporate and sell a good bit of lighting. But the pitfall many inventors fall in is a common one.
I had a friend years ago who worked at a major consumer products company, and he told me once the way they looked at developing new products was to basically “make something that works to do what we want” and then “make it better.” Inventors are very, very good at that first part, they can actually make something that does something (something being some goal like say, transmitting voice over copper wires etc.) But many inventors fail badly at the second part, or are just plain disinterested in it. But it’s actually that “make it better” part that is the difference between products people can actually use and essentially toys put together but brilliant tinkerers.
Samuel Colt didn’t invent the revolver, but we know him a lot more than we know any of the other early revolver makers because he’s the one that actually made models that could be sold by the thousands and were reliable enough to gain wide acceptance.
I have a similar line of thinking when it comes to powered flight. While I don’t think there’s enough evidence to seriously challenge the conventional view that the Wright Brothers achieved the first powered flight, I do think several other individuals out there very well may have beaten them, Richard Pearse for example or Gustave Whitehead. But let’s say we stumble upon new evidence that proves without any doubt Richard Pearse obtained flight before the Wright Brothers, does that diminish the Wright Brothers accomplishment?
I’ll actually say not at all, and if anything it might renew focus on what they did that was actually very important–continue to refine and advance powered flight until it became viable on a large scale. No one else did that, and because that’s an achievement based on lots of activity over many years it isn’t like the singular and to a degree “gimmicky” achievement of being the first person to sustain powered flight.
I also think that is why John Glenn has overshadowed Alan Shepard to a degree. Shepard’s flight and the flight of anyone who goes “up and down” is technically just a lot less impressive than being in orbit. To do any real work in space you need to be in orbit, and John Glenn was the first American to do that. Additionally the requirements in terms of energy output of your spacecraft are immensely higher to attain orbital versus sub-orbital spaceflight. That being said, I think most school children are still taught that Shepard was the first American in space and that Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space. By any definition of space this is true beyond any real doubt.
I will also add that despite Glenn’s flight being more impressive than Shepard’s, Shepard has by far the more impressive career as an astronaut. Shepard is one of only twelve men to have set foot on the moon, and that is unequivocally far more impressive than anything Glenn has ever done in space. There’s something like 500 people now (largely due to the ISS and the many American/Russian/International missions visiting it) who have obtained orbital space flight, so Glenn is just the first American in a really big club. Shepard is one of only 12 in a much more exclusive club representing a much more difficult achievement.
A good book on this subject is The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America by Maury Klein 2009. It goes into great detail on how important the electrical light industry was to developing the US. Originally, night time street and home lighting was the *only *reason for the electrical grid. It wasn’t until (soon) afterwards that the huge boom of electrical devices was created to take advantage of all that power.
Edisons real contribution was designing an electrical lighting system rather than the actual devices themselves.
There were many attempts at incandescent bulbs before Edison and Swan. The biggest problem was that the heated filaments rapidly oxidized in the residual gas. The modern light bulb wasn’t really invented until a sufficiently good vacuum pump was invented.
I’ve always found it odd that we gicve Edison credit for the invention (and he claimed trials with a huge number of test filament) when his original bulb used a carbonized filament (paper or bamboo), a material even Edisonn disliked for its fragility. Tungsten had been prooposed as a filament even before Edison, but it was fragile and brittle and hard to fabricate into filaments, so another technical breakthrough was needed.
The NASA website has film of Shepard in flight in May 5, 1961, here, the video link. Also YouTube here. If a short film in living color of moving eyeballs is too much, then Wikipedia has a photo here:
I assume that it was not shown live on US national TV.
If you ask me, none of these achievements are at all impressive and none of these men deserve anything remotely like the amount of credit they’ve received (I’ve give them a bit for being willing to risk their lives on previously unattempted missions).
The real impressive feats are by the physicists and engineers who designed all these things and made them work. The guys who took the results of all this work and became heroes are just the lucky ones.
No one asked, and no one who cares about space exploration would be particularly interested in an answer like yours.
Many people agree that an immense amount of credit must go to all the scientists and engineers that made the moon landings possible, but it’s ridiculous to take that so far as to say being an astronaut wasn’t an extremely hard job at the time. Also incidentally pretty much every astronaut of the early space programs I’ve ever heard interviewed invariably gives immense amounts of credit to the hundreds of thousands of people who supported the space program and made it possible.
To be an astronaut required an immense degree of intelligence, fitness, poise etc. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts represented a unique merging of extreme pilot skills, physical ability, and mental aptitude. I believe to even be eligible to be considered for these programs you had to have a college degree, and most of them had degrees in aeronautics or various engineering disciplines. So these weren’t big dumb test pilots drooling the whole way up. In fact, that’s why Chuck Yeager kind of shit on the astronaut program, he was basically a big dumb test pilot who felt he should have been involved in it but since he wasn’t college educated he wasn’t eligible so he decided to bash and belittle the space program instead.
One can praise the scientists and engineers who made the moon landings possible–and should, without being ridiculous and saying the astronauts were basically nothing special at all. Read the CVs of guys like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, they most likely did more in their lives than most people will do in two of theirs even if you cut out their entire involvement in the space program.
