By Deb Oestreicher on December 27, 2005. Format: Paperback. I heard the title The Man with the Golden Arm long before I ever read the book or saw the movie. It's a beautiful, evocative title, but it also makes you think of something grotesque: a man with a shiny prosthetic.
Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879, patenting it the following year. Before getting the right design for a long-burning, pleasant light for indoor use, he experimented with more than 1,600 different bulbs.
The early history of the invention of the incandescent light bulb is shrouded in the same kind of dull light that those first bulbs produced. Around 1800, Humphry Davy created the first incandescent light by passing an electrical current through a thin strip of platinum.