Let there be light

Edison is credited for inventing the electric light, but as Ernest Freeberg notes in his The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America , Edison was part of a transAtlantic network of researchers and relied on capital investments to keep his experiments going.

And once he invented the light bulb, it took another set of inventors to put it to use: “When Edison demonstrate his first working light bulbs at Menlo Park in the last days if 1879, this marked the culmination of a long and complex process of invention. But is also staked out a much broader field of technological creativity as many inventors, most long forgotten, worked to realize the light’s enormous potential. As the technology spread in the late nineteenth century, all who saw the light knew that it was good – but it took decades more to realize all that it was good for” (6).

Electric lights also brought a change in daily life that was celebrated across the country. We take electric lights for granted, so “it is easy to forget the excitement and wonder that Americans felt when they saw it for the first time, their giddy sense that they were crossing a threshold into our modern age. In every city, town, and hamlet across the country, one evening marked the moment when electric light arrived, and citizens always turned out to give the technology a warm welcome, honoring the historic event with music, speeches, parades, and ritualistic burial of their old oil lamps” (5).