If you ask a primary school student who invented the electric light, he will definitely answer Thomas Edison. But in fact, Edison himself did not invent the electric light. Edison just made an improvement on the electric light and used tungsten. As a filament, it greatly extends the life of the electric lamp and generally increases the use scope of the electric lamp, so everyone has this misunderstanding.
Among the stories we know about Edison, Edison is undoubtedly a king of inventions. He only went to school for three months, but he has more than 2,000 inventions and more than 1,500 patents, and he is the most famous. One of Edison's patents should be his light bulb. In the story we know, Edison tried more than 6,000 materials and conducted more than 7,000 experiments in order to find materials that could pass light, conduct electricity and emit light. This spirit is undoubtedly Everyone was very touched, but in fact Edison himself did not invent the light bulb. The original founder of the invention of the light bulb should be Joseph Swann of England. He began to study electric lights before Edison was born. He used charcoal instead of platinum wire. Many strips of cardboard were baked into carbon resistors, and the air in the glass cover was evacuated. Then he discovered that the carbon filaments glowed brightly. This was the earliest electric light, and the year Swann invented the electric light , Edison is only one year old.
Swann’s electric light was undoubtedly a breakthrough, but he was still unable to break through the bottleneck of electric light duration, so he had no choice but to give up this experiment. Fifteen years later, vacuum technology has Improvements were made and DC motors were manufactured, which gave him hope again, so he started studying electric lights again. However, because he still used carbonized filaments, his experiments were never successful.
Later, Edison realized the prospects of incandescent lamps, and immediately funded and sent scientists to establish an electric light company, and claimed in the newspaper that it had solved all the problems of electric lights. Swann also criticized Edison for this matter. There was public condemnation, but fortunately the incandescent lamp patent was still owned by Swann, while Edison's incandescent lamp patent was obtained after six years of appeal.