As I understand it one of Edison’s big challenges in developing the electric lamp was the need to develop a near-perfect vacuum inside the bulb so the filament wouldn’t burn out.
Why did it have to be a vacuum? Couldn’t he just have used an insert gas? (Is that what they do nowadays?) Or in the extreme use regular air, but burn something else in the bulb to eliminate the free oxygen?
Maybe the problem wasn’t the filament combusting so much as fragmenting into any adjacent gas?
Some of his problems with a vacuum had to do with sealing the bulb so if inert gases were available to him around 1880 air still would have leaked into the bulb.
Some quick checking shows helium, argon, and xenon were not available to him. I don’t know if he tried carbon dioxide or nitrogen but the same leakage problem would have been there for any gas or the lack of one.
The vacuum inside the bulb had already been proven by Swan as early as 1860. After that, it was a matter of producing a better vacuum (Sprengel, 1875) and then finding a filament that could last long enough to make the whole thing practical.
Edison’s great contribution to the light bulb was the carbon filament, which lasted for 40 hours. He experimented with tungsten, but didn’t have the metalworking capability to succeed.
One serious problem was finding a way to bring the current into the bulb. Copper expands when heated at a different amount than glass. Then it was found that platinum has the same coefficient of thermal expansion as glass. My father recalled that in the very early days (he was born in 1906) bulbs were expensive, but if you brought burnt out bulbs to the electric company, replacements were free. The main cost was the platinum and the company made more on electricity than it could on bulbs. Then a replacement metal, platinite, a roughly 50-50 alloy of iron and nickel, was found. Problem solved.