7 Responses

1. Many people besides Americans think that.

2. textbooks don’t talk about tesla much

   i think he’s generally written off as a kook

   not by me though

3. Nope, not Tesla either.

   The first incandescent electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy, an English scientist. He experimented with electricity and invented an electric battery. When he connected wires to his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light.

4. Ahh you need to go back and re read that again. If he had sold the patent then the world would know he held the patent first. He worked for Edison and it says nothing about him inventing the light bulb tho he was a great inventor of many other things.

   The invention of the light bulb is usually attributed in Britain to Joseph Wilson Swan and in the United States to Thomas Alva Edison (the first to market the device successfully). Some sources indicate that Heinrich Göbel built the first functional bulbs three decades earlier. He later challenged Edison’s patent while living in the United States, but his legal “interference case” was overruled in court. Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin independently developed an incandescent light bulb in 1874. Many others also had a hand in the development of a practical device for the production of electric light.

5. I don’t think many people pay attention to the difference between invention and or registering a patent.
   And to your other Q as to why are history books written backwards, because if they were written forward they wouldn’t be history books.

6. Tesla invented a type of arc lamp, not the incandescent light bulb. Regardless, Tesla was way, way cooler.

7. Tesla invented many important things, but he did not invent the light bulb. Edison didn’t really invent it either–his biggest contribution to the was finding a good material to use as the filament. Tesla worked for Edison and criticized his methods. Edison apparently randomly tried thousands of possible filament materials. Tesla was impressed by his persistence, but basically said it was unfortunate that Edison didn’t use a scientific approach in his research because he could accomplish things much more efficiently that way.

   You may be thinkng of the AC motor patent which Tesla sold to Westinghouse. Westinghouse gets credited in some books for creating the AC motor and the generator….which is really sad.