Industrial Age · North America · Technology

1878

Edison's Light Bulb Work

1878

Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory turned from the phonograph to the problem of a practical incandescent electric light. It took a year of trying every fiber from bamboo to hair before he found a carbonized cotton thread that glowed for forty hours. Private light that did not smell of gas was on the verge of existing.

In context
Also in 1878 (4 other events on record)
Era

Industrial Age (1801–1900), one of 513 events from that era on Saeculum.