In the 1800s, homes were mostly lit with gas lamps. But, they covered everything in soot. Incandescent bulbs produce light by using electricity to heat a thin strip of material called a filament until it gets hot enough to glow. Many people in the 19th century tried to build incandescent bulbs with limited success - their bulbs burned out too quickly. Between 1878 and 1880, Edison tried to come up with a high resistance filament to make existing bulbs burn longer and be more reliable.
At first, he tried using a thin wire of platinum in a glass vacuum bulb. But, the bulb only burned for a few short hours. So, he considered using carbonized materials Instead of platinum. He began carbonizing strips of every plant imaginable, including baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo. He contacted biologists who sent him plant fibers from places in the tropics. He eventually tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths. It was tedious and very demanding work by Edison’s own admission.
Eventually, 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. The bulb lasted for fourteen and a half hours. It had the brightness of sixteen candles. Edison demonstrated the working light bulb in his Menlo Park, NJ laboratory on New Year’s Eve, 1879. He patented it. In the patent, he described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways."
Edison set up a network of bulbs around Menlo Park, which became known as the Village of Light. People came by train every night to see the network of lights and marvel at how the bulbs stayed lit through wind and rain. Edison continued to experiment with bulbs. Several months after the patent was granted, he discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.
This marked the beginning of commercially manufactured light bulbs. In 1880, Thomas Edison’s company, Edison Electric Light Company began marketing its new product. It won a contract to light part of New York City. It created the first commercial power utility called Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan and used wires and conduits to distribute the electricity needed to light the bulbs. Edison also developed the first electric meter to track how much electricity each customer was using.