Betwen 1820and 1879 there were quite a few attempts at making a sucessful Lamp. Inventors such as Roberts, Swan, Farmer, Maxim, etc. tried their hand at making a practicle lamp, but little was achived for quite a while.
By the late 1870'sthere were several men that came quite close to sucess. Names such as Maxim, Sawyer and Man, Swan, and Edison come to mind. As it turned out, Sir Josepf Swan in England developed the forst real sucessful Lamp, But Edison made the major step and developed The Edison System that startedit all
In 1877 Edison and his crew staarted work on developing a practical Incandescent Lamp. By 1878, Edison made his First Lamp. This lamp consisted of a glass tube with a coiled Platinum "burner" in a glass enclosure opperating in a vacume. This lamp had a regulator that short circuited the lamp when the filament got too hot. These Platinum Burners, as they were called, were worked on into 1879, but there would soon be a major step in the development of the Incandescent Lamp.
In that later part of 1879 edison worked on creating a high resistance filament for his lamp> This meaning a ling thin conductor. He tried everything from human hair to a snipet from a spiders web. Eventualy edison tried to carbonize a hairpin shaped piece of cotten sewing thread. After many failed attempts to insert the carbonized thread in the glass envelope, the Edison team finaly suceeded. When electricity was applied, this lamp lasted about 13 hours. Edison soon switched to a bristolboard(paper) filament which was the type used on Christmas Eve of 1879 to demonstrate the Edison lamp for the first time to the public.
In 1880 the first electrical instalation was planned for the steamship, S. S. Columbia. This was the first instalation of a Lighting system commercialy ever. The lamp and sockets used were quite crude, the lamp sitting loosely in the socket. The socket had to sit in an upright position, or the lamp would fall out. The lamps before 1880 were made in the glassblowers house at the Menlo Park Laboratory. In 1880 Edison opened the forst lamp factory to start the production of incandescent lamps. For two years the lamps were made at this factory with little machinery, before the new plant oppened in Harrison, NJ in 1882.
