I googled for this and found nothing, but my googling skills are, well, pathetic. Is Edison’s first light bulb still burning in his laboratory in Florida? Please supply your search terms if you googled.
From the Edison National Historic Site:
That last sentence strongly implies that it burnt out.
A search on “oldest light bulb” turns up the bulb at the Livermore fire department. Burning since 1902, it’s not an Edison. It was made by Shelby Electric Co.
Osram boasts a 90 year old bulb, but it hasn’t been on continuously.
Bah! See what doublechecking and providing links has done? I am beaten by Squink! Henceforth I shall hastily post the briefest of uncited text.
Hmm. Well, my first search terms would be
edison “first lightbulb”
which gets you this webpage but I think the guy who made it is full of it.
I could refine my search terms a bit, but in popular historical matters, something more authoritative would be a better place to look. Note that Wikipedia, while a popular choice of mine, is based on the mostly unaccoutable collective writings of thousands, and therefore can sometimes be out to lunch.
The page on lightbulbs seems trustworthy enough, and declares that “By 1880 he had a device that could last for over 1200 hours”, with additional text implying that (as one may expect) all his lightbulbs were tested to destruction.
The Livermore Fire Dept. cite is from 1972. Unhappily, during the push to conserve power during the oil crisis of the Carter administration I’m pretty sure the bulb was turned off. When it was turned back on it burned out which is a frequent occurance.
I think Edison’s laboratory and workshop were in Menlo Park, NJ.
According to this website:
*After one and a half years of work, success was achieved when an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread burned for thirteen and a half hours. *
Since that was in the 1870’s we can rule out that it is still burning.
As for search terms, well I do not always use Google. I like to give the little guy a chance (HotBot, AltaVista) and in this case I used www.webcrawler.com
they’ve been around quite a while.
As for the search terms, they were “Edison’s First Light Bulb” and I clicked the “Exact Phrase” box.
(Would Edison’s First Light Bulb ne a good band name?)
Hmmm looks as if I took 10 more minutes and I get “beaten” by 3 of you.
There was something odd that happened with the bulb (I think maybe a move or an earthquake during the 80’s?), however, the Livermore Centennial Light Fact Sheet says:
Edison’s winter home was in Fort Myers, Florida
The bulb that the Edison National Park Service regard, in the link provided by Squink, as the first definately burnt out. In his biography Edison (Wiley, 1998, p186), Paul Israel quotes from the entry in laboratory notebook N-79-07-31, written by Charles Batchelor. The experiment started in the morning of October 22nd 1879 and the bulb shone uninterrupted for 13 1/2 hours. They then increased the voltage, but that overheated it and the glass cracked after about another hour. (Unfortunately, the notebook doesn’t yet appear to be online at the Edison Papers.)
One could argue that, while it was this bulb that demonstrated to Edison and his collaborators that carbonized filaments were the way to go, it was only one stage in the process of inventing the light bulb. They never thought that this particular version was a viable design and the search for the right filament continued into November at full tilt. Success wasn’t declared until after another, better version was found. This bulb was switched on on the 12th and then switched on and off over the next few days. Having accumulated 16 hours worth of use, it burned out at noon on the 17th. That trial is covered by notebook N-79-08-22. There’s a letter, again quoted by Isreal, from Francis Upton, one of the researchers at Menlo Park, written on the 16th saying that this has nailed the problem. Edison went public shortly thereafter.
Like Nanoda, I’m utterly dubious about this claim: the filament is the wrong shape. Edison wanted to use spiral filaments and had tried some, but this line of research had been abandoned just before the October 22nd experiment above. Batchelor had switched to using a horseshoe shaped filament and it was such a shape that was used in the remainder of the experiments. That bulb may be an Edison light bulb from the research days, but it’s not the “first successful carbon filament lamp”.
Robert Conot’s biography Thomas A. Edison (1979; Da Capo, 1986, p158-9) reproduces several of the bulb designs used during 1879.
Though, as that article correctly notes, he didn’t buy the property till 1885. He did however build a lab as part of the house.