Nearly every American school boy and girl that is educated in the American school system is taught that Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb in 1879. Thomas Edison was an incredible inventor with over a thousand inventions and patents. However, there's a difference between an invention and patent. He did hold the patent and he did invent his own light bulb, but he did not invent the light bulb contrary to many Americans belief. He actually bought the patents from those who did.

A chemist in England called Humphrey Davy first invented the light bulb in 1810 by inventing the miner's safety lamp (known as the Davy lamp) which used an arc light. It worked by connecting a battery, invented in 1800 by Italian physicist Count Alessandro Volta, to two wires, and attaching the other ends of the wires to a strip of charcoal. The charcoal became electrically charged and began to glow with arcs of electricity in the air surrounding it.

Another inventor by the name of Warren De La Rue placed a coil made of platinum into an empty tube and allowed an electric current to pass through to form the first known proto-light bulb in 1820. This worked well but the problem was that the material for the coil (platinum) was extremely expensive to obtain, making the design impractical for commercialization.

Finding the right filament took some time. The challenge was to find a filament of very fine wires that would produce light. This word “filament” came from the Latin word 'filare' which means 'to spin'. The theory behind the filament was developed by James Prescott Joule, an English physicist who stated that, “if an electric current was passed through a resistant conductor, (the filament), it would itself glow hot with from the thermal energy and therefore produce light.

In 1840 an English physicist and chemist Joseph Wilson Swan produced a workable electric light and twenty years later in 1860 he patented the incandescent lamp with a filament made from carbonized paper in a partial vacuum. This was the world's first electric light bulb. In 1878 he demonstrated his new version; unfortunately his light bulb did no last very long.

Thomas Edison was no ordinary inventor and due to his past successes and fame, had a number of wealthy industrialists providing him with money to back his projects. He was able to buy Swan's patent from the company that then owned it.

Edison improved the life span of the light bulb invented by Swan. His further experiments lead to better and better versions until by 1880, his bamboo fiber filament lamp, a 16 watt bulb, which lasted between 1200-1500 hours.

The reason it burned so long was due to the complete lack of oxygen inside the glass bulb. He was assisted in the design by two Canadians, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans efforts. They had no financial backing themselves and their patent rights were bought by Thomas Edison. As a result Thomas Edison is credited as the father of the light bulb.

Many improvements were made since Edison light bulb went into production. The biggest was when tungsten was introduced to make the filament by the General Electric Company in 1910. The improvements by General Electric made in the filament made the light bulb a practical way of providing artificial light through the world.

That is the history of who invented the light bulb.

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