section_path: History
section_name: History
paragraph_text: History
  
  Before electric lighting became common in the early 20th century, people used candles, gas lights, oil lamps, and fires. In 1799–1800, Alessandro Volta created the voltaic pile, the first electric battery. Current from these batteries could heat copper wire to incandescence. Vasily Vladimirovich Petrov developed the first persistent electric arc in 1802, and English chemist Humphry Davy gave a practical demonstration of an arc light in 1806. It took more than a century of continuous and incremental improvement, including numerous designs, patents, and resulting intellectual property disputes, to get from these early experiments to commercially produced incandescent light bulbs in the 1920s.
  
  In 1840, Warren de la Rue enclosed a platinum coil in a vacuum tube and passed an electric current through it, thus creating one of the world's first electric light bulbs. The design was based on the concept that the high melting point of platinum would allow it to operate at high temperatures and that the evacuated chamber would contain fewer gas molecules to react with the platinum, improving its longevity. Although it was an efficient design, the cost of the platinum made it impractical for commercial use.
  
  William Greener, an English inventor, made significant contributions to early electric lighting with his lamp in 1846 (patent specification 11076), laying the groundwork for future innovations such as those by Thomas Edison.
  
  The late 1870s and 1880s were marked by intense competition and innovation, with inventors like Joseph Swan in the UK and Thomas Edison in the US independently developing functional incandescent lamps. Swan's bulbs, based on designs by William Staite, were successful, but the filaments were too thick. Edison worked to create bulbs with thinner filaments, leading to a better design. The rivalry between Swan and Edison eventually led to a merger, forming the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company. By the early twentieth century these had completely replaced arc lamps.
  
  The turn of the century saw further improvements in bulb longevity and efficiency, notably with the introduction of the tungsten filament by William D. Coolidge, who applied for a patent in 1912. This innovation became a standard for incandescent bulbs for many years.
  
  In 1910, Georges Claude introduced the first neon light, paving the way for neon signs which would become ubiquitous in advertising.
  
  In 1934, Arthur Compton, a renowned physicist and GE consultant, reported to the GE lamp department on successful experiments with fluorescent lighting at General Electric Co., Ltd. in Great Britain (unrelated to General Electric in the United States). Stimulated by this report, and with all of the key elements available, a team led by George E. Inman built a prototype fluorescent lamp in 1934 at General Electric 's Nela Park (Ohio) engineering laboratory. This was not a trivial exercise; as noted by Arthur A. Bright, "A great deal of experimentation had to be done on lamp sizes and shapes, cathode construction, gas pressures of both argon and mercury vapor, colors of fluorescent powders, methods of attaching them to the inside of the tube, and other details of the lamp and its auxiliaries before the new device was ready for the public."
  
  The first practical LED arrived in 1962.