Who Invented The Light Bulb?

[Music] the hunger or the desire for people to be able to illuminate their surroundings especially at night has been there forever most of the world lived in darkness from dusk until dawn light was very rare light was very expensive I wasn't surprising that when electricity came on the scene some individuals would start thinking about well how can we use this continuous electricity to create light they knew what was at stake there was a lot of money to be made they may look the same but the lights of today are almost nothing like those of yesterday because now it's all about LEDs and they are completely taking over in 2018 the LED lighting market was estimated to be worth almost 52 billion dollars and is expected to reach over a hundred and twelve billion by 2024 here's how we went from this to this we enter the story around 1802 at that time the world knew about electricity but was just starting to understand how to control it there were no power plants houses didn't have electrical outlets but there were batteries the only power source was batteries and they weren't very good batteries about the best thing they could do was power a telegraph a 23 year old British chemist named Humphrey Davy had one of those batteries he performed some experiments using platinum he connected to the platinum across the voltaic pile and it would heat up and before it melted it would produce a bright light so he's generally credited was really the first to create artificial electric light so in 1802 Davy realized that if you hook up certain kinds of metals to a battery they glow for a while before they melt then in 1806 he showed that if you put two pieces of carbon close together and run enough electricity through them the current will arc through the air and also create light but he's limited by how weak these batteries are so 25 years passed and in 1831 one of Humphry Davy's former assistants michael faraday discovers electromagnetic induction and creates the first generator suddenly we can create electricity on demand developments that happened during the mid 19th century improved on those devices to the point where they could actually produce enough power that could be useful for Motors or potentially for electric light the first practical electric lights are based off of Davies 18:06 carbon arc lamp they use massive amounts of energy and produce massive amounts of light it wasn't till early you know 1850 1840 we started seeing this in street lighting and area lighting but it was extremely bright light source it was very difficult to manage it was expensive which is suitable if you're lighting up a town square but really not if you're trying to read by it it's a bit intense work continues on heating something to create light which is called incandescent lighting but it's slow-going they have power now but still can't figure out how to make a lamp that doesn't melt or burn out quickly there's a missing piece sometimes the invention just has to wait it has to wait for the technology to catch up with it and that's the case with the light bulb the one thing that was missing was a good vacuum pump and in order to keep carbon from oxidizing and burning up or to keep the Platinum from melting you needed to have a vacuum and a good vacuum and in 1865 German chemist Hermann springle invents the mercurial air pump which gives scientists the ability to remove air from a bulb much more efficiently and help stop their filaments from burning up during this period of time there were a number of different inventors that were working on different technologies but wasn't really until Joseph Swan that there was a serious contribution that ended up being carried forward in 1878 British physicist and chemist Joseph Swan was 50 years old and had been thinking about electric lights for decades he'd recently returned his focus to them after the debut of these much improved vacuum pumps Swan built a lamp that I used a carbonized cotton thread in a vacuum and he was able to get that to light and incandescent I'm that was really I think most historians recognized as being kind of therefore the first real significant milestone in the development of the incandescent lamp at the same time in the United States Thomas Edison started working on electric lights at the time when Edison was working on his electric lamp he was already the Wizard of Menlo Park he was very well known by the public he had already invented the phonograph he had invented the quadrature Telegraph Edison's first attempt on a lamp used a platinum filament similar to what others had used and he came to the same conclusion that even in a vacuum it just required too much power to light this thing and it's important to take a step back and realize that we're almost eighty years into the story of lightbulbs and Edison has just now shown up one thing you can say about Edison and he didn't invent things just to invent them he invented them to make a business out of it so the economics of the electric lamp was an important factor in his thinking so he swapped his original Platinum filament for carbon much like Swann's lamp used that then he put inside an evacuated glass enclosure they were expecting it might last a few hours and it ended up burning for two days which for a lightbulb at the time that was quite an accomplishment Edison knew he wasn't the only person working on carbon filament electric lamps and he wanted patent protection so he quickly applied for one and it was approved in late January 1880 then he announced his invention to the world Oh [Music] the first reaction of the scientific community was the whole thing was a hoax despite that the public went crazy over it it must have seemed fantastical because light was contained within a glass tube there was no visible flame I can't even imagine what it must have been like to encounter that isn't it dull all of the components that went into Edison's 1879 bulb already existed in one form or another elsewhere he did not invent the light bulb but he did make one that worked well and created a commercially viable system to go along with it the thing we have to keep in mind is that hardly any one person invents any one thing any of the major electrical inventions I can think of all dependent upon contributions from a broad range of people Edison was really the genius that was able to take it from lab to marketplace and we sort of saw rapid evolution of commercially viable lamps the gas stocks for lighting all plunged the Edison stock went up dramatically and the public embraced it rapidly light bulbs were suddenly a business and Edison was leading the industry problem was that Edison didn't quite have all the kinks worked out yet but he did have a great patent and his patent despite the attempts of many others to enter the market protected his business very effectively so he was really the only game in town in the early 1880s in terms of incandescent lighting and this is one of the challenges in fact that others had in entering the market Westinghouse decided that he wanted to compete in the electrical market and so he began selling electrical devices and electric lamps and was immediately sued by the Edison Company and they won so he was not allowed to compete others eventually found ways to enter the market mostly because of Edison's focus on direct current and not the eventually more successful alternating current but Edison remained the public face of electric lighting but he hit a snag when he applied for an additional patent in the UK because Joseph Swan already had a patent there so Edison suing Swan for infringement and the suit was not successful so they are forming a joint venture called Eddy Swan the two companies so any ASL that were sold in Great Britain and actually mostly in Europe were produced by eros Juan but Edison's legacy is the one that endured and his name was tied to electric light as the world embraced it once the lights came people would turn on every light in the house and then they would drive away from the house just to be able to look back it in and see what it looked like fully illuminated it was a life-changing event just this flip of the switch the light really you don't have to turn any more read it all in weeks you don't had what I shouldn't blows Edison saw it lighting as an urban invention he first imagined lighting say New York City the streets the commercial districts the homes of the wealthy only in the 1930s and 40s did much of rural America see electric light and many of the poorer sections of cities didn't have electric light for corresponding amount of time in the early 20th century work was focused on improving existing bulbs to make them more robust and last longer but for the most part they didn't stray too far from Edison's 1879 design light bulbs were such a big deal that in 1925 several major lightbulb manufacturers including General Electric and Philips formed what became known as the Phoebus cartel it existed to control the price of light bulbs and limit their lifespan to a thousand hours even though bulbs of the time could last much longer than that it was one of the very first examples of broad scale planned obsolescence around the same time lights like Edison's were taking off a new kind of light was being developed fluorescent it started with sending an electric current through a gas making it glow like in neon lights but these lamps gave off strongly colored light and much of the energy was emitted as invisible ultraviolet light and as a result they weren't all that useful eventually a phosphor coating was added to the inside of the bulb which converted that invisible ultraviolet light to visible light and the modern fluorescent light was born these are the predecessors of the long tubes still lighting many office buildings today thrust lamp got introduced at the World's Fair in New York in 1940 here was a light source that create a lot of light with high efficacy high brightness relatively inexpensive so in the 40s and 50s we started seeing the introduction of this commercially and it started to slowly displace in the 50s incandescent lamps well here the marketplace bifurcated we saw incandescent almost exclusively in residential and commercial it's all fluorescent fluorescent lights were bigger and more efficient while incandescent lights were cheaper motivated by the 1973 oil crisis and a desire for a bulb that used less energy the compact fluorescent bulb showed up in 1976 the idea was simple take a fluorescent tube and twist it up into something the size of an incandescent bulb the problem was compact fluorescent doesn't produce the kind of color or have the performance attributes that people are used to so all of a sudden we had compact fluorescent lamps on the marketplace that were 10 times as expensive the color was a little weird a little strange it didn't dim nicely but it lasted a long time and gave a great energy savings and so what we did we spent the 90s and a large portion of the from you know 2000 to 2007 encouraging consumers to use compact fluorescent with rebates with government programs a lot of money time energy education spent on us but unfortunately didn't work well the government pushed CFLs because they saved money in energy but they ultimately couldn't compete with the quality of light that an incandescent bulb is capable of if we take a step back to the 1960s when incandescent bulbs are already in most houses and fluorescent bulbs are in most office buildings scientists were working out yet another technology light-emitting diodes or LEDs a type of solid-state lighting and LEDs create light in an entirely new way an LED is a semiconductor diode and there are many kinds of diodes there is a solar cell diode which takes light such as sunlight and converts it to electrical current that can say power your home certain diodes when you put electrical current in can actually emit light and depending on the exact configuration of the light you can generate particular colors so the process of making an LED starts with a wafer and on that wafer we will grow our semiconductor device structure and we put it in a machine where we can atomically deposit layer by layer by layer and create the semiconductor device after that you have one big circular slab of LED material all that's left is placing thousands of electrical contacts on it and cutting them into individual pieces these pieces are all individual LEDs and are what you run electricity through to get light but when they were first developed LEDs were not terribly bright and the kind of light you could create with them was limited in 1968 the first mass-produced visible light LEDs entered the market first by Monsanto followed by Hewlett Packard yes the huge farming subsidiary was once in the business of light and they went into calculators and little small LED signals then as time went on we found ways to make the LEDs much more powerful and efficient and in different colors one place they weren't though was in lightbulbs that's because at that time scientists were struggling to create high quality white light with them and it's centered around one thing an inability to create blue LEDs to produce white light in an LED you have two fundamental options one you can mix red blue and green the same way painters do the other is you take a blue emitting pump and you add through phosphor conversion those other colors to create white and in general illumination the latter is the overwhelming majority of how the LEDs are produced blue LEDs were a huge challenge to make and really it was Suzy Nakamura that had a breakthrough I honestly remember sitting at my desk I was an engineer and someone from R&D came running down with a paper that was published and said look at this they made the brightest blue LED that is actually going to be competitive and it was a shock because big companies had been and it really broke the barriers and then everyone jumped on board and started getting into this indium gallium nitride technology but you needed that blue LED in order to really expand the lighting space and be able to do the white conversion in 2014 soo-ji Nakamura along with isamu akasaki and hiroshi amano won a Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which was work they did in the early 90s it was this breakthrough that fundamentally changed what could be done with LEDs we were able to do all the things that you could do with compact for us but in a smaller package with a little bit more control on the potential for color what we've done is we've taken a blue light that's about the size of a grain of salt and then put a phosphor on it and convert the blue light to white light and that's a complete game-changer and that allows you to do all kinds of novel designs you can also drop it and it will still work so it's extremely robust and it's highly energy efficient the other very nice part about LED lighting x' is the lifetime a typical bulb may last incandescent bulb a year a typical CFL might last five years but LED bulbs are rated at twenty years part of the early hurdle to adoption was you had many companies that were producing traditional light bulbs were a big part of their business model was the fact that these bulbs only last a certain period of time and then they have to be replaced unlike fluorescent is relatively easy to tweak to adjust to make a color spectrum that mimics very closely incandescent or daylight characteristics so in 2015 we saw the first commercial availability of high color quality LED lamps that would truly replace incandescent lamps so LEDs are taking over and it's because LED lighting offers almost all the benefits of older lighting techniques and fixes almost all their problems they're more efficient than any other type of lighting and their efficacy continues to grow in just the last 10 year white LEDs have become 330 percent more efficient the quality of their light is very high you can control their brightness and color you can easily make them smart and incorporate them into rooms and ways previously impossible and their price is steadily going down at some point we will approach an asymptote in terms of just how efficient this technology can be we're not there yet there's a lot of innovation that's still going to happen in our industry we have not come across anything yet that indicates for illumination applications that there's technology that would replace LED there's no obvious successor to it at this point in time today LEDs are in lightbulbs street lights and office lights they're lighting up this screen on your cell phone and powering its flash they're in TVs cars and traffic signs they're the reason your Apple watch knows your heart rate they are everywhere what's interesting to me is how the incandescent bulb took on a glow of nostalgia you know you seen the upscale lighting catalogs the return to the look of the early bulb those both of being sold for $15 each and you can hang them without and you know so it's all part of this nostalgia for incandescent now for a majority of the world electric light is taken for granted were at a privileged place in the history of light bulbs where the focus of much current research revolves not around just taking away darkness but creating light that affects us in specific ways with God light but is it good do I like it and is that having an impact on me so now we're getting into biology and this is circadian lighting with the idea that the lighting is going to impact my health now how does it make me more productive how does it make me more comfortable how does it contribute to my wellness at the end of the day am i happier with this I mean that's ultimately how we're lighting spaces if I want to be really happy I have daylight but if I'm working inside in a hospital environment or I'm in a patient room or I'm in a classroom I want that light to be the highest quality you know I don't want it to be good for me we're on the cusp of that now [Music]

Channel: CNBC

Views: 312,415

Keywords: CNBC, business, news, finance stock, stock market, news channel, news station, breaking news, us news, world news, cable, cable news, finance news, money, money tips, financial news, Stock market news, stocks, who invented the light bulb, light bulb invention, light bulb types, light bulb edison

Id: vnTLCiKVAqY

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019