The Invention of the Electric Light

We forget that for most of history, there was little to be done but sleep once the sun disappeared. Today, our lives run on electrical power, and people are not constrained any more by nature's schedule. What was once revolutionary has become an ordinary necessity.

But humans did not harness electricity overnight. Many of the nineteenth century's brightest minds carved a winding path from idea to reality out of the social and economic realities of the day: wars, revolutions, scientific research, and cultural awakenings. Thomas Edison gets deserved credit for inventing the incandescent lamp, but without the research of earlier European scientists and engineers such as Vasily Petrov, Humphry Davy, and Pavel Yablochkov, Edison's lamp might never have lit. With his triumph, electricity began to exert its power over the course of history.

As part of a series of extensive historical case studies on technical innovations, B. J. G. van der Kooij's "The Invention of the Electric Light" presents a comprehensive look at a profound invention that has become essential to modern life. He goes to great lengths to explain how this technological development occurred in several "clusters of innovations." Through micro-level vignettes of individual scientists and inventors, and macro-level discussions of nineteenth-century socioeconomic and political realities, van der Kooij reminds us that human brilliance never occurs in vacuum.