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The invention of arc lighting naturally led to a search for methods by which electricity might be used to provide illumination for homes. The bright and sometimes flickering glare of arc lamps made them entirely unsuitable for this purpose. Sir Humphry Davy, in addition to discovering the principle of the electric arc, had also noted the ability of electricity to produce incandescence, and during the sixties and seventies scientists theorized that electric lamps might be produced which utilized this principle. But the problems to be solved before a workable incandescent lamp could be created were much greater than those which had to be worked out before arc lighting became practical. An incandescent substance had to be found; to avoid swift oxidation it could be heated only in an atmosphere of nitrogen or in a high vacuum, and if this latter alternative were to be used, pumps capable of producing a higher vacuum than any currently in use would have to be developed.

Furthermore, development of the system required the solution of many difficult economic problems. Arc lights had no competition in their field, so cost was not a problem. But incandescent home lighting would have to compete with gas light and kerosene lamps, which had already greatly reduced the cost of illumination. One important cost factor was the amount of copper which would have to be used in transmission lines. In order to keep copper costs down, relatively thin wires would be required. If these were adopted, Ohm's law made it apparent that transmission voltage would have to be high in order to avoid excessive current loss in the lines. Since it was considered impossible at the time to use alternating current, stepping a high transmission voltage down to a voltage suitable for house circuits by the use of transformers was out of the question. The use of high voltage required proportionally high resistance in the incandescent filament, thus complicating the problem of finding a suitable substance. Most metals could be expected to burn away quickly under these circumstances. Resistance could be increased by hooking lamps in series, but such a circuit, in which all lamps must be turned on at once, was scarcely practical for home use. Hooking lamps in parallel circuit, the other alternative, was considered theoretically impossible by many scientists during the early seventies. In the face of all these difficulties many electrical engineers concluded that designing a practical system of incandescent lighting would require a lifetime of research, if indeed the job could be done at all.

Yet a practical incandescent lamp was invented after only fourteen months of experiment between 1877 and 1879, and an incandescent lighting system was in operation by 1882. Although many inventors were at work in the field, the accomplishment was mainly the work of one man-Thomas A. Edison--and it was not only one of the greatest scientific achievements of American history but a triumph of engineering and entrepreneurship as well.

The story of Edison's difficult childhood is too well known to need repetition. Becoming a railroad news butcher at an early age, he soon learned telegraphy and wandered over much of the northeastern United States as in itinerant operator, always poor and sometimes destitute. Yet he bought and studied books on electricity and tinkered with improvements for telegraphic apparatus, among them a printing receiver and a duplex transmitter. His initially unsuccessful attempts to market these devices made him keenly aware that successful inventions must be commercially feasible--a valuable lesson which scientists trained in laboratories sometimes did not learn. After he finally landed a permanent job in the small research department of Western Union, company officials, slowly coming to appreciate his tremendous abilities, commissioned him to undertake developmental projects. When in 1876 they offered him $500 per month to work on the "speaking telegraph," he was able to establish himself in the famous laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, and go into the business of invention.

The inventor of the multiplex telegraph, the mimeograph machine, the phonograph, the microphone, the motion picture, and incandescent lighting--not to mention important developments in electrical power and other fields--Edison was a towering figure who gained world renown. But because of his slight knowledge of science and his purely pragmatic methods he also had the limitations common to most American inventors up to his own time. He owed his success primarily to an intuitive ability to find out how things worked, an almost fantastic drive to solve problems, a determination to adopt invention to commercially profitable ends, and a well-developed ego which enabled him to publicize himself and his accomplishments with no trace of embarrassment. His lack of training in basic science, however, seemed occasionally to give him feelings of inferiority which led him to deprecate the efforts of mathematicians and physicists whom he employed. His purely pragmatic methods, and perhaps to a lesser degree his occasionally hostile attitude toward scientists, provoked a rather patronizing response from the eminent electrical engineer, Nicola Tesla. "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack," Tesla wrote on one occasion, "he would proceed at once with the diligence of a bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. . . . I was a sorry witness to such things knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor." Yet at the time Edison's methods were probably better designed to yield practical results than the "theory and calculation" of Tesla, because many of the contemporary theories regarding electricity were wrong. . .

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