The 100-year-old lamp ... and its inventor In a fire station in California, there is a light bulb. It is only special in one way. It was turned on for the first time in 1901, so it has been in use for nearly 120 years. That’s more than one million hours. At first, the fire officers turned the light on and off in the normal way, but they never turn it off now because they are afraid that it will not turn on again. They do not even clean it anymore. The bulb has become famous around the world, and it has its own website where you can actually see the bulb in use. It is at http://www.centennialbulb.org/photos.htm#anchor1234. It is called an Edison bulb because the design is from an invention by Thomas Edison. Edison was born in the USA in 1847. He did not go to school. His mother taught him at home. From an early age, he worked. Most children did at that time. He sold sweets and newspapers on the trains near his home. At the same time, he did experiments and began to invent things. While he was still a child, he became deaf in one ear and then lost some of his hearing in the other ear after an illness. But he said it was easier to work when he didn’t have lots of sounds around him. Edison did not only invent the light bulbs which we use today. He invented more than 1,000 new devices, including a machine which recorded sound and a machine which recorded movement – the film camera. Edison was famous for spending as much time as he needed to solve a problem. When an experiment failed for the hundredth time, he said, ‘I haven’t failed. I have found 100 ways which don’t work.’ |