Father of the Light Bulb

For decades, we’ve repeated the rhetorics of Thomas Edison being the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. And this photo of him posing with his invention lends credence to that assumption. While there’s some element of truth to it, it’s false. Still, we must recognize Edison’s contribution to refining the light bulb.

In reality, there were over 20 inventions of similar concepts before Edison’s lamp. Names like Sir Humphrey Davy and Warren De la Rue beat Edison to it. But once his first lamp with a cotton thread filament produced 13 hours of light, he made further modifications that yielded as much as 1,200 hours of lighting.