> practical bulb using carbon rods in nitrogen filled bulbs
Arc lamps are good for search lights, but they suck enormous amounts of power, will burn your eyes if you glance at them, and are totally unsuitable for residential lighting. Just imagine someone lighting up your living room with an arc welder - it's the same thing. You'd go blind.
Your argument seriously underestimates the utility of Edison's high voltage, low current design. It persisted with little change up until just recently when LEDs finally displaced them. It's a pretty amazing run.
de la Rue's design failed because it relied on a platinum filament - not practical. It also relied on low voltage and high current - a dead end.
That quote is about low voltage technology. Edison’s design changed dramatically over time, his early bulbs used a carbon filament just like the quoted example. Tungsten bulbs invented by Franjo Hanaman in 1904 where a significant improvement on that design and he’s arguably the actual inventor of modern incandescent lightbulbs.
Similarly, the gasses uses inside bulbs and the filament design all changed significantly over time.
PS: Arc lamps like florescent bulbs are “high voltage, low current design” however all early incandescent bulbs where low voltage. Edison improved the design of low voltage bulbs, but he hardly invented the idea.
His direct competitor at the time had a patent out 1 year sooner, entered mass production one year later, had as you say lower resistance. (Blanking on the name).
Prior to this various different bulbs where created that had more or less resistance. It was a wild time period prior to centralized power distribution.
and think of all the electric power wasted trying to block that light. Besides the crackling/buzzing sounds, and the toxic smoke wafting off of it, and trying to keep it from setting fire to your drapes.
All fluorescent bulbs are just a specific subtype of Arc lamps. In the 1970’s plenty of different gasses where being used in Arc Lights. For example in 1860, John Thomas Way used arc lamps operated in a mixture of air and mercury vapor which eventually evolved into mercury vapor lamps which where invented before Edison, but the first popular variation was invented in 1901.
Also a fairly thin sheet of glass blocks most of the UV, welding masks are thick and dark because welding produces a lot of light and you want significant eye protection from shards etc. Modern ARC lamps are bright specifically because we have incandescent bulbs when you want less light.
It’s the same basic reason people use incandescent bulbs at home. They Mercury etc Lamps might last longer and be more efficient, but incandescent bulbs produce more pleasing light, started up faster, don’t flicker, are quite, etc.
They where very much an improvement for home use, but the lighting market was fairly large by the time Edison’s bulbs showed up, which is what allowed for such rapid growth.
> the lighting market was fairly large by the time Edison’s bulbs showed up
Not really, as Edison needed to install a generator even to light up his bulb coming-out party, and needed to come up with a central generator to electrify city blocks because people wanted his bulbs, not arc lamps.
Edison's bulbs, with their high resistance, used far less electric power than arc lamps.
So did everyone he sold a bulb to in the early years. Central power distribution didn’t start until 1881, but a great many places had generators back then. It’s still the seemingly flat part of the hockey stick graph, but zoom in and you’re looking at exponential growth so starting 10 years early would have dramatically cut into sales.
> Edison’s bulbs, with their high resistance, used far less power than arc lamps.
Edison’s bulbs where less efficient so they needed more power to produce the same light as arc lamps. In applications where a single Edison bulb was sufficient it used less power, but it was extremely common back then to use multiple bulbs as early incandescents didn’t put out much light and it was only companies or the ultra wealthy who could afford to electrify. He was in the sweet spot entering a large enough market to be profitable, and then riding exponential growth into true wealth.
Oddly, this is also why he favored peep shows over movie theaters. His bulbs didn’t put out enough light to project movies.
Arc lamps are good for search lights, but they suck enormous amounts of power, will burn your eyes if you glance at them, and are totally unsuitable for residential lighting. Just imagine someone lighting up your living room with an arc welder - it's the same thing. You'd go blind.
Your argument seriously underestimates the utility of Edison's high voltage, low current design. It persisted with little change up until just recently when LEDs finally displaced them. It's a pretty amazing run.
de la Rue's design failed because it relied on a platinum filament - not practical. It also relied on low voltage and high current - a dead end.