Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, but he made affordable, long lasting electric light a reality. And this wasn’t just because he was struck by a sudden inspiration (a light bulb going off over his head): it was because because of disciplined experimentation coupled with a commitment to industrialisation. Most people know that Edison worked his way through thousands of designs for bulbs before patenting a bulb with a carbon filament, and that, even after filing his patent, he worked through thousands more choices for the material that would provide the carbon filament, finally settling on bamboo. It is less frequently mentioned that Edison and the workers at this lab also invented much of the equipment necessary to produce bulbs at scale, as well as the infrastructure needed to distribute power.

Edison himself said of this endeavour that, ‘There was no precedent for such a thing, and nowhere in the world could we purchase these parts. It was necessary to invent everything: dynamos, regulators, meters, switches, fuses, fixtures, underground conductors with their necessary connecting boxes, and a host of other detail parts, even down to insulating tape.’