In 2007 there was an excellent exhibition of the photography of Catherine Wagner at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. Wagner had done an artist residency at the Baltimore Museum of Industry for almost two years and, in the course of it, discovered the museum’s collection of historic light bulbs, which numbered over 50,000. Her pictures focused on older bulbs from the 1890s and the 1900s, but also included experimental and colorful bulbs from later in the 20th century. Photos of old bulbs doesn’t sound like much on paper, but looking at them is quite an experience, and you can see in them the hand-blown glass bulbs and the many different materials and shapes of the filaments. You can see more of them at the Stephen Wirtz web site.

Because for many decades, Thomas Edison in the United States, Joseph Swan in England, and several others in Europe and the U.S. were racing to perfect what used to be called “light-in-a-bottle.” Countless experiments were carried out with a multitude of materials to determine what the brightest and longest-lasting material would be to make up a light bulb’s filament. Compressed charcoal, platinum, something called “tar-putty,” and even carbonized bamboo were tried until tungsten was settled on as the most efficient ingredient for a good filament.

Hot competition for bringing the best bulb to market involved Edison in dozens of trials brought by and against him. The most well-known may be the proceedings he brought against the United States Electric Lighting Company for patent infringement. The evidence that eventually won him both the case and a secure place in history took the shape of a box of prototype bulbs that was produced by his assistant John Howell with the words, “I hereby produce the lamps.” (If only the writers of Law & Order could come up with a line that good.) The box was found in 2006 in someone’s attic, and you can get an even better idea of the evolution of incandescent bulbs by looking at what was inside, as well as read about the trials of Edison at the edisonian.com.

So, as much as all of us here are convinced of the advantages of LED light technology, and as much as it is an important part of the future, let’s take a moment to appreciate the good old light bulb, and that all it took to vastly change the old world into the modern world was a wire with electricity passing through it (which is all an LED bulb is, too, after all.) Let’s remember a time when incandescent bulbs were the future, and an amazing, blazing one at that.