How is light bulb made

Incandescent lamps make light by using electricity to heat a thin strip of material called a filament until it gets hot enough to glow. Many inventors had tried to perfect incandescent lamps to "sub-divide" electric light or make it smaller and weaker than it was in the existing arc lamps, which were too bright to be used for small spaces such as the rooms of a house.

Edison's lamp would consist of a filament housed in a glass vacuum bulb. He had his own glass blowing shed where the fragile bulbs were carefully crafted for his experiments. Edison was trying to come up with a high resistance system that would require far less electrical power than was used for the arc lamps.

This could eventually mean small electric lights suitable for home use. By January , at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light.

It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours. In order to improve the bulb, Edison needed all the persistence he had learned years before in his basement laboratory. He tested thousands and thousands of other materials to use for the filament. He even thought about using tungsten, which is the metal used for light bulb filaments now, but he couldn't work with it given the tools available at that time.

One day, Edison was sitting in his laboratory absent-mindedly rolling a piece of compressed carbon between his fingers. He began carbonizing materials to be used for the filament. He tested the carbonized filaments of every plant imaginable, including baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo.

He even contacted biologists who sent him plant fibers from places in the tropics. Edison acknowledged that the work was tedious and very demanding, especially on his workers helping with the experiments. He always recognized the importance of hard work and determination. I cannot say the same for all my associates.

Edison decided to try a carbonized cotton thread filament. When voltage was applied to the completed bulb, it began to radiate a soft orange glow. Just about fifteen hours later, the filament finally burned out. Further experimentation produced filaments that could burn longer and longer with each test.

Patent number , was given to Edison's electric lamp. The Edison lamp from our Attic is dated January 27, Whitney invented a treatment for these filaments that allowed them to burn bright without darkening the insides of their glass bulbs.

William David Coolidge, an American physicist with General Electric, improved the company's method of manufacturing tungsten filaments in Tungsten , which has the highest melting point of any chemical element, was known by Edison to be an excellent material for light bulb filaments, but the machinery needed to produce super-fine tungsten wire was not available in the late 19th century.

Tungsten is still the primary material used in incandescent bulb filaments today. Light-emitting diodes LEDs are now considered the future of lighting due to a lower energy requirement to run, a lower monthly price tag, and a longer life than traditional incandescent light bulbs.

Nick Holonyak, an American scientist at General Electric, accidently invented the red LED light while trying to create a laser in the early s. As with other inventors, the principle that some semiconductors glowed when an electric current was applied had been known since the early s, but Holonyak was the first to patent it for use as a light fixture.

Within a few years, yellow and green LEDs were added to the mix and used in several applications including indicator lights, calculator displays, and traffic lights, according to the DOE. Today, lighting choices have expanded and people can choose different types of light bulbs, including compact fluorescent CFL bulbs work by heating a gas that produces ultraviolet light and LED bulbs.

Several lighting companies are pushing the boundaries of what light bulbs can do, including Phillips and Stack. Phillips is one of several companies that have created wireless light bulbs that can be controlled via smartphone app. The Phillips Hue uses LED technology that can quickly be turned on or off or dimmed by a flick on a smart phone screen and can also be programmed.

The higher-end Hue light bulbs can even be set to a large range of colors only about sixteen million and synced with music, movies, and video games. It can automatically sense the ambient lighting and adjust as needed, it turns off and on via motion sensor when someone enters the room, can be used as a wake up alert, and even adjusts color throughout the day to fit with human's natural circadian cycles and patterns of natural light.

The light bulbs also have a built-in learning program that adapts to inputs given by residents over time. And all of these functions can be programmed or monitored from any smart phone or tablet. It is estimated that Stack smart light bulbs can use about sixty percent less energy than a typical LED light bulb and lasts between twenty and thirty thousand hours depending on the model as compared to anywhere between twenty five and fifty thousand hours for typical LED light bulbs in proper housings.

These light bulbs are compatible or soon will be with many of the options for turning an entire home into a smart home including usage with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomeKit. Follow LiveScience livescience. Live Science. The tungsten is arranged in a double coil in order to fit it all in a small space.

That is, the filament is wound up to make one coil, and then this coil is wound to make a larger coil. In a watt bulb, the coil is less than an inch long. Tungsten is used in nearly all incandescent light bulbs because it is an ideal filament material.

In the next section, we'll find out why this is, and we'll examine the role of the glass bulb and inert gas. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar.

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