Inventions: Lighting it up!

Can you imagine coming home after nightfall and having to light all the candles, or fumble around to light the kerosene lamps just so that you could have enough ambient light to perform your routine activities? Just imagine coming home after a long day only to have to cook in a dimly lit home, or the tremendous eye strain you'd incur from reading in an insufficiently lit area.

Electric home lighting is so engrained in our lives that we can hardly imagine that just 100 years ago, it was not commonplace. Flicking on the light, except for the exceptionally wealthy, didn't exist. It's commonly believed that the lightbulb was invented in 1879 simultaneously by Thomas Edison in America, and Josesph Swan in England. However, there were actually 22 other inventors of incandescent lightbulbs before then. For a variety of reasons, Edison's bulb (shown on the left) was the one that caught on and proliferated. I say "Edison's lightbulb", but really the everyday lightbulb was based on a design by a Toronto medical electrician Henry Woodward and his associate Matthew Evans. They patented the lightbulb but didn't have the financing to commercially produce it, and ended up selling it to Edison, which he used to light up his bankroll.

So if this happened in the 1880s, how can I claim this is an invention of the 20th century? Simple. It wasn't until 1904 that the first tungsten filiment was used in an incandescent bulb, and not until 1910 when William David Coolidge invented an improved method of creating tungsten filiments that the modern-day incandescent lightbulb came into existence. Incandescent lightbulbs are great because they're so cheap and widely available, but the major problem is that there is that they produce more heat than light, which is a tremendous waste of energy. Other types of light bulbs, such as halogen, fluorescent, and LEDs have been invented, all of which are much more energy efficient than incandescents.

Home lighting is an area where technology can help reduce the effects of human ignorance. Lighting accounts for a large portion of world-wide energy consumption. With more efficient lighting technologies such as LEDs and CFLs (compact fluorescents), the amount of energy used to light our indoors is being reduced even as the number lights increases. Another big improvement is in the way light are controlled. The light control trend is moving toward motion sensing, where lights are automatically turned on and off as people enter and exit rooms. This will inevitably save a tonne of energy as lights being left on when they are not in use is a waste of energy.

Electric home lighting has allowed us to extend the length of our day and be more productive. Because of this simple fact, it is one of the most important inventions that has enhanced livability.