Dumb History of Light Bulb

History that may or may not be true: written by a self-celebrated writer who has, like Thomas Edison, not failed 10,000 times but wrote 10,000 jokes that aren’t funny. Unlike Thomas Edison though, this writer does not have a funny middle name. Better, he has no middle name at all. This writer failed for the 10,001st time to understand the function of a middle name in an age where we barely remember the first name of most people. If you ask this writer, he’d say most people should just have only first names like slaves of the past. We’re all slaves to capitalism anyway, unlike capitalist Thomas Alva Edison.

Like all great inventions, the light bulb cannot be credited to one inventor. Nevertheless, we shall credit it to Thomas Edison. Let's just go by what’s in our history books. Let's not add to them now. They are too long already. Anyway, how much history is too much history? But is this even history? Or is it science? It is not my intention to put the light bulb through an existential crisis after all its years of evolution. If you ask me, we should just add it to history book sometime after the American Civil War. All proven science is history anyway. And science has a tendency to make everything sound boring.

Enough digression. The light bulb is truly a great invention. Today, children have no excuse not to study at night. Adults can now work not only during the day but also at night. How fun! The invention of light bulb became directly responsible for the invention of “burnout”. Just like bulbs, humans are also now capable of burnout, Thanks to Edison.

Edison was a man of focus. He was deaf in one ear and almost deaf in the second. So when his friends called him to come and play, he couldn’t listen to them. Even if he did, he pretended as if he did not listen to them. Edison was the world’s first introvert, or not. There’s no way to know. What we do know is that instead of playing with other children like other children, he ran two successful businesses when he was barely thirteen: a newspaper stand and a fruit stand. If you plan on bargaining with him, good luck. He can’t hear you. He was an unstoppable force in science. He generated patents and manufactured businesses left right and center.

Haters would say Edison’s great invention was his fame. But that is not true at all. His greatest and favorite invention was the phonograph. He recorded “Mary Had a little lamp” and played it back. Nobody believed him. “Really? No way I sound like that?”, they couldn’t believe their voice. And winced and ignored his invention. 

Some reports, like this one, suggest that Edison himself couldn’t hear the recording because he was deaf. Other reports, unlike this one, suggest that people could hear back “Mary had a little lamp” but all they were interested were was the lamp. No problem, Edison shifted his attention to the light bulb. He was a man of many ideas. But, he wasn’t the man to invent the light bulb. It was Joseph Swan. 

As a matter of fact, light bulbs existed in some form or the other well before Edison invented by his mother. Edison’s true claim was not about creating the first light bulb but about creating the first marketable bulb. He tweaked Swan’s invention to make it practical by making the bulb last 1500 hours before burning out. That’s precisely 1500 more hours than I could ever last before burning out. 

Like a true entrepreneur, Edison made Swan his partner and renamed his light company Ediswan after he was successfully sued by Swan for patent-related issues. On the brighter side of history, Edison, with a flick of a switch banished darkness away. 

For the second time in the history of history, Edison said, like God said all those years ago, “Let there be light” and created light. But unlike God, Edison created light that works at night also. So in a way, Edison did a better job than God. In other ways, Edison was the Steve Jobs of his time. One was fond of cigars and the other died of cancer. That’s how irony works. 

Now back to the sun, the first light bulb ever created. God decided to create a single light instead of creating one for every household. Good thing, he hid the remote switch from the people, otherwise we’d be fighting wars over who should have it. But it was built with an auto-shut-off feature. So it is turned off half the time. If you live in a place like Seattle, where god loves you even less, it hardly ever turns on. One might think the Sun is faulty, but it is by design, albeit a faulty one. Sure, he created the moon to compensate for it, but it now feels like an afterthought. We all agree that the moon is quite useless as a source of light. It doesn't even turn on fully most of the days. Even when it does fully turn on, you hardly can see anything. People just gave up and slept whenever the moon came out. That was all before Light Bulb.

Now thanks to Edison, all that changed forever. And ever. And ever. Now I can stay up all night and keep typing “and ever and ever and ever”. I’m not saying I’ll do that because obviously, I am not that type of a fool. I’m just saying how this possibility was made possible by Edison’s lamp. Lights out and Thank you!