- 1840, first usable light bulb. Warren De la Rue enclosed a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube and passed an electric current through it. Worked fine. Platinum had a high enough melting point and could be drawn into wire, but was too expensive.
- 1840-1911 - era of crappy carbon filament light bulbs. Some fooling around with tantalum and osmium, but too expensive. Early tungsten work.
- 1906, William D. Coolidge at General Electric figures out how to make tungsten wire from tungsten powder. Finally, a cheap high-temperature (3410° C) wire. By 1911, GE is shipping tungsten-filament lamps. Same concept as de la Rue, but much cheaper. Tungsten filaments dominate incandescent bulbs thereafter.
"The Taming of Tungsten" is a chapter in "Men and Volts", a history of General Electric.[1] GE bought up the patent rights of Hanaman, Alexander, and a few others for tungsten filaments. It still took years of metallurgy work at GE to get a production process for making tungsten wire in large quantity. Here's a video of the whole insanely complex process, from ore to wire.[2] That plant was in Euclid, Ohio. Opened in 1913, closed in 2010, now a huge vacant lot. I once lived about two miles from there.
The FBX crypto people ordered a tungsten cube for their lobby, as a status symbol. It was made and delivered, and found in a storage building in the Bahamas. I wonder where it ended up.
- 1840, first usable light bulb. Warren De la Rue enclosed a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube and passed an electric current through it. Worked fine. Platinum had a high enough melting point and could be drawn into wire, but was too expensive.
- 1840-1911 - era of crappy carbon filament light bulbs. Some fooling around with tantalum and osmium, but too expensive. Early tungsten work.
- 1906, William D. Coolidge at General Electric figures out how to make tungsten wire from tungsten powder. Finally, a cheap high-temperature (3410° C) wire. By 1911, GE is shipping tungsten-filament lamps. Same concept as de la Rue, but much cheaper. Tungsten filaments dominate incandescent bulbs thereafter.