While the arc lamp was being commercially established, it was at once seen that it was too large a unit for household use. Many inventors attacked the problem of making a smaller unit, or, as it was called, “sub-dividing the electric light.” In the United States there were four men prominent in this work: William E. Sawyer, Moses G. Farmer, Hiram S. Maxim and Thomas A. Edison. These men did not make smaller arc lamps but all attempted to make an incandescent lamp that would operate on the arc circuits.
Sawyer’s Incandescent Lamp, 1878.
This had a graphite burner operating in nitrogen gas.
Farmer’s Incandescent Lamp, 1878.
The graphite burner operated in nitrogen gas. This lamp is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Sawyer made several lamps in the years 1878–79 along the lines of the Russian scientists. All his lamps had a thick carbon burner operating in nitrogen gas. They had a long glass tube closed at one end and the other cemented to a brass base through which the gas was put in. Heavy fluted wires connected the burner with the base to radiate the heat, in order to keep the joint in the base cool. The burner was renewable by opening the cemented joint. Farmer’s lamp consisted of a pair of heavy copper rods mounted on a rubber cork, between which a graphite rod was mounted. This was inserted in a glass bulb and operated in nitrogen gas. Maxim made a lamp having a carbon burner operating in a rarefied hydrocarbon vapor. He also made a lamp consisting of a sheet of platinum operating in air.
EDISON’S INVENTION OF A PRACTICAL INCANDESCENT LAMP
Edison began the study of the problem in the spring of 1878. He had a well-equipped laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, with several able assistants and a number of workmen, about a hundred people all told. He had made a number of well-known inventions, among which were the quadruplex telegraph whereby four messages could be sent simultaneously over one wire, the carbon telephone transmitter without which Bell’s telephone receiver would have been impracticable, and the phonograph. All of these are in use today, so Edison was eminently fitted to attack the problem.