Electric light

Lore & Background

Before electric lighting became common in the early 20th century, people used candles, gas lights, oil lamps, and fires. In 1799–1800, Alessandro Volta created the voltaic pile, the first electric battery. Current from these batteries could heat copper wire to incandescence. Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov developed the first persistent electric arc in 1802, and Humphry Davy gave a practical demonstration of an arc light in 1806. It took more than a century of continuous and incremental improvement, including numerous designs, patents, and resulting intellectual property disputes, to get from these early experiments to commercially produced incandescent light bulbs in the 1920s.

In 1840, Warren de la Rue enclosed a platinum coil in a vacuum tube and passed an electric current through it, creating one of the world's first electric light bulbs. The design was efficient but the cost of platinum made it impractical. William Greener made significant contributions in 1846. The late 1870s and 1880s saw intense competition, with Joseph Swan in the UK and Thomas Edison in the US independently developing functional incandescent lamps. Their rivalry led to a merger, forming the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company. The turn of the century saw the introduction of the tungsten filament by William D. Coolidge in 1912, which became a standard for incandescent bulbs.

In 1910, Georges Claude introduced the first neon light. In 1934, a team led by George E. Inman built a prototype fluorescent lamp at General Electric's Nela Park laboratory. The first practical LED arrived in 1962, but early LEDs were inefficient and only displayed deep red colors. The first high-brightness blue LED was demonstrated by Shuji Nakamura in 1994, leading to the first white LED. By the start of the 21st century, LED lamps suitable for general lighting were entering the market, and in 2009 Philips introduced the first lamps designed to replace standard 60 W Edison screw fixture light bulbs.

Reader's Guide

The electric light fundamentally transformed human life by providing safe, reliable, and controllable artificial illumination, replacing candles, gas lights, oil lamps, and fires. Its development spanned more than a century, from early experiments with arc lights and incandescent filaments to the modern dominance of LEDs. The energy efficiency of electric lighting has significantly improved since the 19th century. Incandescent bulbs, which convert only 2–5% of energy into visible light, are being phased out worldwide in favor of more efficient technologies like compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and LEDs. The phase-out, driven by government regulation and consumer preference, contributed to a decrease in US electricity usage by 2019. The invention of the blue LED in 1994 enabled white LED lighting, which by 2009 could replace standard 60 W incandescent bulbs. The legacy of electric light is its ubiquity and its continuous evolution toward greater efficiency, with modern sources available in a profusion of types and sizes for virtually every application.

Did You Know?

• The first persistent electric arc was developed by Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov in 1802.
• Warren de la Rue created one of the world's first electric light bulbs in 1840 using a platinum coil in a vacuum tube.
• The first high-brightness blue LED, demonstrated by Shuji Nakamura in 1994, enabled the development of white LEDs.
• By 2019, US electricity usage had decreased for at least five straight years, due in part to consumers replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs.