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.
Before Swan, the earliest predecessor of the light bulb was Humphry Davy's electric light in 1802. However, the first person to enclose a light in a vacuum was Warren de la Rue in 1840. Because it was made with platinum, it was not a cost-effective way of producing light.