The early history of the invention of the incandescent light bulb is shrouded in the same kind of dull light that those first bulbs produced. Around 1800, Humphry Davy created the first incandescent light by passing an electrical current through a thin strip of platinum. It was not bright enough, nor did it last long enough, to be practical, but it drove scores of inventors over the next seventy-five years to determined experimentation with the technology.
Thomas Edison, the man we most associate with the light bulb, began his serious research with the incandescent light bulb in 1878. The following year, he created and patented an electric incandescent lamp with a carbon filament. Commercial use of Edison’s electric lamps came quickly: his lighting system was first installed on the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company’s ship, the SS Columbia, in 1879, and three years later the first electric lights were installed in downtown Manhattan. These early successes were to be harbingers of massive change. Just forty-three years later in 1925, over half of all US homes had electric lights. Today, ninety years on, artificial light is so ubiquitous, that when the power goes out, and the lights turn off, we panic.
Keeping the darkness permanently away, and allowing us to work whenever and wherever we wanted – what had for millennia been nearly impossible, had now become commonplace.
Today, the electric light bulb is the iconic symbol of new ideas. The image of an inventor with an illuminated light bulb over his hear has replaced the vision of one shouting “Eureka,” in the common vocabulary. The metaphor is apt, and understandable. In one moment, a light bulb goes from off to on with a flick of a switch, and in the same way, new ideas seem to spring forth fully formed from the creative mind. But, how did the idea of a light bulb come to represent a new idea?
In English, the first recorded use of the the word “bright” in the 1100s was to describe the brilliance of the sun. In the 1380s, Chaucer used it in his poem “Troilus and Criseyde”:
What is the sonne wers, of kinde righte,
Though that a man, for feblesse of his yen,
May nought endure on it to see for brighte?
The word bright was later used to describe people. First, in the 1600s, as lively, cheerful and animated, or as a antonym to the word dull. By the 16th century, it had come to mean something similar when used to describe ideas, thoughts and conversations.
By the mid 1700s, the term was being said to describe children who were clever or displayed an intelligence remarkable for their age. A hundred years on, the word meant a combination of all these, a meaning akin to our modern understanding of the word.
In the late 19th century, before the development of practical techniques to reproduce photographs on the printed page, illustrations and cartoons were a mainstay of newspapers worldwide. Editors would commission illustrations to depict events described in the articles, or to easily express a point of view. Early reports of Edison’s success with the electric light bulb were often illustrated with drawings a dark room illuminated by a single lamp.
As the bulb’s success became more and more apparent, Edison himself quickly became a celebrity. Many drawings and photographs from the time, depict Edison leaning against a workbench, holding an electric light bulb. These iconic photographs of Edison, the so called “Wizard of Menlo Park,” equated the inventor’s prolific output with the light bulb in the public’s mind. The bulb came to stand for all of Edison’s inventive prowess.
As a symbolic representation of Edison’s slew of new ideas, it wasn’t long before the the symbol came to be associated with the concept of new ideas generically.
Edison’s improvement of the electric light coincided with the world’s new understanding of the of the word to describe someone, or something, as intelligent and inventive. That Edison’s electric light bulbs were also bright like the sun, also helped to connect and cement these two concepts as analogous concepts in the minds of the public.
In the early twentieth century, Felix the Cat was the world’s favorite animated animal. Created more than a decade prior to Mickey Mouse, Felix was the most popular cartoon character of the silent-film era. The anthropomorphic black cat, with his white eyes and a giant grin, was unable to speak because of the limitations of the medium, but Felix’s emotions and thoughts were projected both through his exaggerated movements, and through various kinds of physical manifestations. When Felix was thinking, symbols and letters would sometimes appear over his head, and he would often use them as props: question marks became ladders, and musical notes became vehicles. It was in these symbolic images that we first see the light bulb used to represent a new idea.
Felix the Cat’s success eventually faded away with the rise of the talking-pictures in the late 1920s. Disney’s “Steambot Willie”, one of the first cartoons with sound, was the end of Felix’s wide popularity. But one symbol lived on long after the black cat: the picture of a light bulb appearing over his head to represent a new idea.
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