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Who invented the lightbulb?

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Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#41

Post by rsynnott »

noxer wrote: post #39
rsynnott wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that basis, Apple invented the smartphone, and Zoom probably invented video conferencing. Being the one to make a version of an existing thing that's good enough to actually use regularly, and developing a supporting infrastructure, is important, but isn't really invention.

Obviously not, smartphones existed before Apple made one and video conferencing existed before zoom.

And lightbulbs existed before Edison; that was my point. It's just that for various reasons they weren't that useful for normal people and were mostly only used in niche applications.

Edison (and others; it was pretty regional) convinced consumers they wanted lightbulbs, much as Apple convinced consumers they wanted smartphones and Zoom convinced consumers they wanted VC.

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#42

Post by screye »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

Seems Edison invented the light bulb in much the same way Steve Jobs invented the modern smartphone. Both took existing technology, added the missing pieces to make it a wide scale, must have product, created an ecosystem around it, and popularized it to the market, and reaped massive monetary rewards. As far as the regular person is concerned, calling the person most responsible for the widespread adoption of a tech…

That is entirely counter to the existing meaning of 'invention'.

The person to bring the first mature product to market is if anything, the antithesis of an inventor. Edison and Jobs were astute businessmen, and that is high praise enough. The CEO of Boeing did not invent flight, just because Boeing introduced the first modern airliners as people know it.

We do not need to add more superlatives to people who have already been deified in popular culture. Overloading terms like these, only serves dilutes their meaning, at the detriment of language at large.

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#43

Post by noxer »

rsynnott wrote: post #41
noxer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously not, smartphones existed before Apple made one and video conferencing existed before zoom.

And lightbulbs existed before Edison; that was my point. It's just that for various reasons they weren't that useful for normal people and were mostly only used in niche applications. Edison (and others; it was pretty regional) convinced consumers they wanted lightbulbs, much as Apple convinced consumers they wanted smartphones and Zoom convinced consumers they wanted VC.

You could not go an buy a light bulb to put it somewhere where you wanted light. That doesn't mean it didn't exist. It was just not available and the ones that existed probably didn't serve well as a light source. Smartphones however where in stores you could buy them long before Apple made one and they had all the functionality of apples first smartphone.

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#44

Post by bsanr2 »

This article downplays Latimer's contribution, presumably (and ironically) for the same political reasons it derides. Latimer's filament production patent made Edison's lightbulb viable as a mass-produced product. As with Shuji Nakamura, Isamu Akasaki, and Hiroshi Amano and their advancements with production of high-brightness blue LEDs, they did not "invent" blue LEDs, nor the numerous products enabled by the existence of blue LEDs. However, their contributions did indeed make the LED revolution possible in a fundamental manner, in the same way that Latimer's contributions (which did not end at the patent but included further research and consultation for fledgling electric lighting projects around the country) made the electric light revolution possible.

The three Japanese men above received many accolades for their work, including a Nobel prize. The crux of the controversy is white America's perennial reluctance to give just due to black innovators. Hyperbole becomes necessary to counteract their reticence. It would obviously be easier to simply be forthright about black contributions, but here we have yet another example of that not happening; characterizing Latimer's work as a "footnote" reeks of the aforementioned reticence.

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#45

Post by rsynnott »

noxer wrote: post #43
rsynnott wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And lightbulbs existed before Edison; that was my point. It's just that for various reasons they weren't that useful for normal people and were mostly only used in niche applications. Edison (and others; it was pretty regional) convinced consumers they wanted lightbulbs, much as Apple convinced consumers they wanted smartphones and Zoom convinced consumers they wanted VC.

You could not go an buy a light bulb to put it somewhere where you wanted light. That doesn't mean it didn't exist. It was just not available and the ones that existed probably didn't serve well as a light source. Smartphones however where in stores you could buy them long before Apple made one and they had all the functionality of apples first smartphone.

Eh? Of course you could. It would be inconvenient and expensive and not very good, but they were commercially available.

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#46

Post by codethief »

rob74 wrote: post #13
m-i-l wrote: post #9

If questions like this become political within a US-specific persepctive, they can have an element of nationalism when considered with a more global perspective. Many people in the UK know the story of UK-based Joseph Swan developing his own bulb, patenting it, setting up a company and selling it, supplying homes and businesses such as The Savoy, and then a US marketer called Edison later coming along and taking cred…

Same goes for heavier-than-air flight, where many countries have their own aviation pioneers (which they of course like to highlight) who contributed various features until airplanes were finally technologically viable around the time World War I started...

Relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_fl...

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#47

Post by psychoslave »

nix23 wrote: post #8
TeMPOraL wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The heroes of yore were the ones who wrote history. I'm just an editor.

No one 'writes' history, that's why you need historians, they are the ones that can bring a matter into the right context and research why something was 'written' like it is, like it was a battle of 10000 Horsemen when in fact historians know that a that time in hole Europe maximal 3000 Battle-horses existed.

Well, history surely have a lot of good tools to cross information by now, meanwhile historians are still human beings happening in some specific socio-cultural frame. If you rely on someone else analysis – which is reasonable – being aware of the person profile is as important as the impact of the work on shaping society representations.

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#48

Post by baryphonic »

"Who invented ?" is an almost meaningless question. Edison and Swan bear the primary responsibility for producing practical and economical lightbulbs and the electricity distribution systems required for them. But both men were undeniably standing on the shoulders of giants.

The same is true for almost any invention. Most successful inventions aren't created by geniuses out of whole cloth. Rather, inventions are often re-combinations of a variety of pre-existing innovations in a novel way that are practical and efficient. We should give praise to the people who made the litany of small contributions and improvements before the invention, but also recognize that the credited inventor(s) usually made a contribution that was more than the sum of the components.

To use a different example less culturally connected to our time, the ideas of differentiation and integration (they weren't necessarily called this) were fairly well-known before Newton and Leibniz. Those two independently recombined the existing knowledge into a simpler formulation (the fundamental theorems or calculus) and thus get the credit. They made these two concepts highly useful. Yet neither of them could have done his work without thousands of mathematicians who made small mathematical discoveries or inventions in the millennia before them.

Or in another example, Jim Keller recently said that "Moore's Law" is not a result of one set of principles applied repeatedly over the decades, but a result of probably hundreds of individual innovations.[1]

I personally think we should credit teams of people, but perhaps list the inventor who was most successful at producing the technology economically at scale with primary credit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=1805s

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#49

Post by taylodl »

rsynnott wrote: post #41
noxer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously not, smartphones existed before Apple made one and video conferencing existed before zoom.

And lightbulbs existed before Edison; that was my point. It's just that for various reasons they weren't that useful for normal people and were mostly only used in niche applications. Edison (and others; it was pretty regional) convinced consumers they wanted lightbulbs, much as Apple convinced consumers they wanted smartphones and Zoom convinced consumers they wanted VC.

Exactly! General Electric was very much the Apple of the 19th century. Edison's genius was recognizing that he had to create demand for his product. It was not the case of "build it and they will come" - not even with the light bulb! Not only that, but Edison made the light bulb economically viable for everyday use. That's not a small feat! In a similar vein we all know Ford didn't invent the automobile, he was able to mass produce the automobile and make it affordable for everyone. We really need to distinguish between invention and mass production and scaling. Every country likes to claim the former, it was the United States that was really good at the latter - especially from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries.

Re: Who invented the lightbulb?

#50

Post by TulliusCicero »

noxer wrote: post #35
TulliusCicero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the article makes it clear that he "invented" the first commercially viable light bulb, not the first light bulb, period.

That's what an inventor does. He puts together something functional and usable. If someone tried before with limited success hes not considered the inventor. The plane wasn't invented by the people who died jumping off of things.

No, you're conflating two different things.

The Wright brothers are credited for inventing the airplane based on their first powered flight, even though this plane was in no way commercially viable or even useful. It was only a proof of concept.

Applying the same principle to light bulbs, you'd have to credit someone earlier than Edison. They had working, functional light bulbs, they were just niche.

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