The Making of the First Commercial Tungsten Filament Lamp

It is often asserted that in 1879 Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) invented the first electric lamp. But this is not so: Edison was only one, however respectable, among many inventors of all kinds of electric lamps and bulbs, which were more or less functional and practical. The first electric lamp was actually invented by the Russian Vasilij Petrov (1761-1834), who in 1802 succeeded to produce a persistent electric arc. In 1846 the Opera theater in Paris was illuminated with arc lamps, and this kind of electric lighting reached its peak with the invention of a Yablochkov candle in 1876. The biggest problem was how to make a filament lamp which would last long enough to be commercially applicable. Even Edison, after trying more than 6,000 different carbon filaments designed an electric bulb that lasted only 14 hours before burning out. Carbon is obviously not durable enough in filaments, despite the later improvements. The most heat resistant material is certainly tungsten, which has the highest melting point (3410 °C) among all the metals and comparable to that of carbon (3500 °C). The first such bulb was patented in 1903 by two chemists, a German Alexander Friedrich Just and Croatian Franjo (Franz) Hanaman.