The Invention Of The Incandescent Lamp - 1

The Invention Of The Incandescent Lamp - 1

IT is possible to imagine a time to come when the hours of work and rest will once more
be regulated by the sun. But the course of civilization has been marked by an artificial
lengthening of the day, and by a constant striving after more perfect means of
illumination. Why mankind should sleep through several hours of sunlight in the
morning, and stay awake through a needless time in the evening, can probably only be
attributed to total depravity. It is certainly a most stupid, expensive, and harmful habit. In
no one thing has man shown greater fertility of invention than in lighting; to nothing does
he cling more tenaciously than to his devices for furnishing light. Electricity to-day reigns
supreme in the field of illumination, but every other kind of artificial light that has ever
been known is still in use somewhere. Toward its light-bringers the race has assumed an
attitude of veneration, though it has forgotten, if it ever heard, the names of those who
first brightened its gloom and dissipated its darkness. If the tallow candle, hitherto
unknown, were now invented, its creator would be hailed as one of the greatest
benefactors of the present age.
Up to the close of the eighteenth century, the means of house and street illumination were
of two generic kinds--grease and oil; but then came a swift and revolutionary change in
the adoption of gas. The ideas and methods of Murdoch and Lebon soon took definite
shape, and "coal smoke" was piped from its place of origin to distant points of
consumption. As early as 1804, the first company ever organized for gas lighting was
formed in London, one side of Pall Mall being lit up by the enthusiastic pioneer, Winsor,
in 1807. Equal activity was shown in America, and Baltimore began the practice of gas
lighting in 1816. It is true that there were explosions, and distinguished men like Davy
and Watt opined that the illuminant was too dangerous; but the "spirit of coal" had
demonstrated its usefulness convincingly, and a commercial development began, which,
for extent and rapidity, was not inferior to that marking the concurrent adoption of steam
in industry and transportation.
Meantime the wax candle and the Argand oil lamp held their own bravely. The whaling
fleets, long after gas came into use, were one of the greatest sources of our national
wealth. To New Bedford, Massachusetts, alone, some three or four hundred ships brought
their whale and sperm oil, spermaceti, and whalebone; and at one time that port was
accounted the richest city in the United States in proportion to its population. The shipowners
and refiners of that whaling metropolis were slow to believe that their monopoly
could ever be threatened by newer sources of illumination; but gas had become available
in the cities, and coal-oil and petroleum were now added to the list of illuminating
materials. The American whaling fleet, which at the time of Edison's birth mustered over
seven hundred sail, had dwindled probably to a bare tenth when he took up the problem
of illumination; and the competition of oil from the ground with oil from the sea, and
with coal-gas, had made the artificial production of light cheaper than ever before, when
up to the middle of the century it had remained one of the heaviest items of domestic
expense. Moreover, just about the time that Edison took up incandescent lighting, watergas
was being introduced on a large scale as a commercial illuminant that could be
produced at a much lower cost than coal-gas.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the search for a practical electric light
was almost wholly in the direction of employing methods analogous to those already
familiar; in other words, obtaining the illumination from the actual consumption of the
light-giving material. In the third quarter of the century these methods were brought to
practicality, but all may be referred back to the brilliant demonstrations of Sir Humphry
Davy at the Royal Institution, circa 1809-10, when, with the current from a battery of two
thousand cells, he produced an intense voltaic arc between the points of consuming sticks
of charcoal. For more than thirty years the arc light remained an expensive laboratory
experiment; but the coming of the dynamo placed that illuminant on a commercial basis.
The mere fact that electrical energy from the least expensive chemical battery using up
zinc and acids costs twenty times as much as that from a dynamo--driven by steamengine--
is in itself enough to explain why so many of the electric arts lingered in embryo
after their fundamental principles had been discovered. Here is seen also further proof of
the great truth that one invention often waits for another.
From 1850 onward the improvements in both the arc lamp and the dynamo were rapid;
and under the superintendence of the great Faraday, in 1858, protecting beams of intense
electric light from the voltaic arc were shed over the waters of the Straits of Dover from
the beacons of South Foreland and Dungeness. By 1878 the arc-lighting industry had
sprung into existence in so promising a manner as to engender an extraordinary fever and
furor of speculation. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, Wallace-Farmer
dynamos built at Ansonia, Connecticut, were shown, with the current from which arc
lamps were there put in actual service. A year or two later the work of Charles F. Brush
and Edward Weston laid the deep foundation of modern arc lighting in America, securing
as well substantial recognition abroad.