Thomas Edison of the Edison patent to charge a more reasonable rate for the use of the Edison patent rights and lowering the price of the electric lamp. On October 8, 1883, the US patent office ruled that Edison's patent was based on the work of William E. Sawyer and was, therefore, invalid. Litigation continued for nearly six years, until October 6, 1889, when a judge ruled that Edison's electric light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of high resistance" was valid. To avoid a possible court battle with Joseph Swan, whose British patent had been awarded a year before Edison's,
Electric motor The first commercially successful DC motors followed the invention by Zénobe Gramme who, in 1871, reinvented Pacinotti's design. In 1873, Gramme showed that his dynamo could be used as a motor, by connecting two such DC motors up to 2 km from each other, using one as a generator. In 1886, Frank Julian Sprague invented the first practical DC motor, a non-sparking device that maintained relatively constant speed under variable loads. Other Sprague electric inventions about this time greatly improved grid electric distribution (prior work done while employed by Thomas Edison), allowed power from electric motors to be returned to