Hitting the Books: Why nobody knows Hiram Maxim, inventor of the incandescent lightbulb
In the forty years before Edison’s first successful prototype, at least twenty people presented, patented, and demonstrated incandescent lamps—using electricity to heat a filament until it glowed. The first recorded attempt was in 1838 by a Belgian inventor whose bulb used a strip of carbon as a filament.
Seven months after that bit of carbonized thread showed promise, they tried a piece of bamboo: a six-inch strip burned for three hours and twenty-four minutes at seventy-one candlepower . “The best lamp ever yet made,” an Edison associate noted, “here from vegetable Carbon.
Maxim was the classic American tinkerer, once describing himself as a “chronic inventor.” Although self-taught—one biographer describes him as “semiliterate”—over his lifetime, he invented an astonishing array of tools and toys.
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