He was both the “most illustrious and useful citizen to the American nation” as well as “the ace of swindling” as he called himself. Thomas Edison (1847-1931) bought out more patents than he set out to invent himself. He was certainly good at feeling the zeitgeist, and the era was modern. A happy coincidence that allowed him to develop other qualities: his business sense, his pragmatism, his remarkable immorality and his admirable lack of scruples.
In January 1880, he received the patent for his latest invention: the incandescent light bulb, the first light without fire. Already at the time, there was no mystery about the purchase of a Canadian patent, filed in August 1874, nor that it was inspired by the work of Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) on electric arcs.
In his glassblowing workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison seeks to obtain the perfect light bulb and the perfect filament. If the improvement of the latter is rapid, the glass envelope regularly shatters. In 1879, Edison appealed to Corning Glass Works, a company which was oriented precisely towards industry and the mechanical sciences, and developed a new glass. Thanks to him, Edison managed in October 1879 to obtain a bulb capable of lighting for more than thirteen hours when those of his predecessors fell into darkness after a few minutes.
In 1880, glassblowers at Corning produced two empty bulbs per minute. They then had to be transported to Menlo Park, then to Harrison (near Newark) where the assembly workshops were successively installed. An almost exclusively female workforce is trained as flame glass artisans and fashions the airtight glass seals around the electrical wires to hold the essential filament in place. Then the bulbs are emptied of their air to promote their longevity.
In 1888, the Christmas tree of the Edison family shone with forty bulbs, a luxury still inaccessible to ordinary mortals and a fine tribute to the birth of the Christian god whose rays of divine light still struggle to reach the incredulous Thomas. In 1887, the latter traveled the United States, electrocuting all the unfortunate domestic creatures that crossed his path with the sole aim of discrediting the alternating current promoted by his competitor George Westinghouse (1846-1914), a crusade that would lead straight to invention of the electric chair.
The light bulb associated with Edison becomes at the same time the symbol of knowledge, of epiphany, which does not lack salt since the invention of the light bulb was not his and its development was as long as it was empirical. A modern and amoral Prometheus, Edison substitutes fire for his only light. Thanks to a filament bursting like a miniature thunderbolt, humanity gradually domesticates what was first divine will, before becoming that of a switch.
