Early research & developments. The story of the light bulb begins long before Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879. In 1800, Italian inventor Alessandro Volta developed the first practical method of generating electricity, the voltaic pile.

When did light bulbs become common in homes?

Efforts by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison led to commercial incandescent light bulbs becoming widely available in the 1880s, and by the early twentieth century these had completely replaced arc lamps.

When were light bulbs widely used?

Early experimenters such as Joseph Swan began trialling materials to make a durable filament as early as the 1840s, although it wasn't until the 1870s that he and Thomas Edison most famously produced commercially viable lamp bulbs.