Incandescent light bulb

An electric lamp that produces light by heating a filament until it glows, usually inside a glass envelope. It emits much of its energy as heat rather than visible light.

Joule heating: The production of heat when electric current passes through a material with electrical resistance. Electrical resistance heats the bulb’s filament until it reaches a temperature at which it glows.
Humphry Davy: An English chemist whose early nineteenth-century experiments included producing light with an electric arc. His arc-light experiments preceded practical incandescent lamps and helped define electric lighting as a possibility.
Household lighting: The use of lamps to illuminate homes and their interior spaces. Incandescent bulbs became a familiar source of warm light in domestic fixtures.
Electrification: The expansion of electrical power systems and their use in homes, industry, and transport. Incandescent lighting became a prominent household benefit of expanding electric grids.
Compact fluorescent lamp: A compact fluorescent lamp that uses a gas discharge and phosphor coating to produce visible light. It uses less electricity for similar light output but contains a small amount of mercury.
Black-body radiation: Electromagnetic radiation emitted by an idealized body whose spectrum depends on its temperature. The hot filament emits a broad spectrum of radiation, much of it outside visible wavelengths.
Joseph Swan: An English physicist and chemist who developed practical incandescent lamps in the nineteenth century. Swan built working carbon-filament lamps in Britain before and alongside Edison’s commercial system.
Edison screw: A threaded electrical lamp base standardized for connecting bulbs to compatible sockets. The common screw base made incandescent bulbs replaceable across a wide range of fixtures.
Electric power distribution: The delivery of electricity from transmission networks to consumers and local equipment. Widespread bulb use depended on dependable systems that brought power into buildings.
Fluorescent lamp: A gas-discharge lamp in which ultraviolet radiation excites a phosphor coating to emit visible light. Its discharge-and-phosphor mechanism differs from the heated solid filament.

Linked from 17 pages