The Light Bulb, or 120 Years of Failure

From Maggie Koerth-Baker in The New York Times:

The electric light was a failure.  Invented by the British chemist Humphry Davy in the early 1800s, it spent nearly 80 years being passed from one initially hopeful researcher to another, like some not-quite-housebroken puppy. In 1879, Thomas Edison finally figured out how to make an incandescent light bulb that people would buy. But that didn’t mean the technology immediately became successful. It took another 40 years, into the 1920s, for electric utilities to become stable, profitable businesses. And even then, success happened only because the utilities created other reasons to consume electricity. They invented the electric toaster and the electric curling iron and found lots of uses for electric motors. They built Coney Island. They installed electric streetcar lines in any place large enough to call itself a town. All of this, these frivolous gadgets and pleasurable diversions, gave us the light bulb.

I like stories like this, as they remind us that success is often slow, and generally involves many people who toiled in failure or near-failure for decades, and that in the end it's so often the culture of the times and the sum total of many events that make something happen.

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