The one thing we can count on when it comes to our understanding is that it’s rarely a cup filled sufficiently. To wit:

Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin (1847-1923) was quite the engineer and inventer. The Tambov Cadet School graduate went on to serve a short stent for his Russian military, then retired from military service and entered…further military life, this time at the Tula weapons factory.

It was while working on an important project that Lodygin invented an interesting little thing for which he was granted Russian patent number 1619 (applied for in 1872, granted in 1874.) The patent described a glass container with a thin carbon filament that, when electricity was applied, glowed. It created light. It was a light bulb.

Shortly after that, Lodygin went on to start the rather obvious follow up to the light bulb: a lighting company.

In the 1890s, the years after immigrating to the United States, Lodygin worked on all sorts of metallic filaments to replace the short-lived carbon filament. One metal he settled upon was tungsten. In fact, a patent he was granted that dealt with light bulbs utilizing tungsten filaments was sold, in 1906, to General Electric. Yes, that GE — the ones who bring good things to light.

Coincidentally, in 1874 some bright work was going on in Toronto, Ontario Canada. In that year Henry Woodward ( a medical student) and Mathew Evans (a Woodward friend and hotel keeper) patented an interesting little thing: an evacuated glass globe containing a carbon element that, when electricity was applied, created light. An electric light bulb.

Woodward and Evans didn’t have the monetary means to pursue the success such an invention should bring, so they sold their patent to a fellow by the name of Thomas Alva Edison.

Ask most people and they’ll tell you Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. In fact, Edison did not invent the incandescent light bulb; he used worked previously done (including that patent from Woodward and Evans) as the basis of his group’s designs to make a bulb last longer and, thereby commercially viable. Edison’s patent followed almost five years after Lodygin’s and Woodward & Mathews’ patents.

But what about Heinrich Göbel, you may ask. (Or, you may be asking, “Who’s Heinrich Göbel?”)

Glad you asked.

Old Henry was born in Germany in 1818 and died seventy-five years later. A man after my own heart, Göbel was, early in his life, a watchmaker. And an inventer.

He spent some time at the polytechnic institute in Hanover. He enjoyed making galvanic batteries to power his tinkering with all things electrical. One day around 1847 or so, he got the bright idea of using electricity to create a source of light from a compressed space inside a glass container. It worked.

In 1948, he set off for the one place where his invention could be turned into a living: the United States of America. In three months time, he and his wife landed in New York, where he lived and worked until he died in 1893.

But it wasn’t until 1854 that his invention — a carbon element inside a glass container fed with electricity — became a real, working reality. (Actually, the glass containers were Eau de Cologne bottles, and the elements were carbonized pieces of bamboo.) He got his invention to produce light for nearly 400 hours.

The electric lightbulb went public, a full twenty years before the patents on which the Edison group’s work was based came into being. (There was reported to be a court battle with Edison many years later which Edison lost. Still looking for more information on that.)

So, what makes “Edison” and “lightbulb” synonymous in the minds of so many people?

Edison’s group took existing work and improved upon it. It was a long road between the average lifespan of a bulb (100 hours) to the 1,500+ hours Edison’s bulb eventually produced.

In 1880, Edison filed a patent application on a lightbulb. But the US Patent Office ruled in 1883 that the patent was actually based on the work of a fellow named William Sawyer.

And then there was Joseph Swan, a British inventor who also obtained a patent on a lightbuld. Swan’s was dated a full year before Edison’s. Also, Swan is reported to have demonstrated his working lighbulb ten years prior to his patent being issued. As it turns out, Edison’s lightbulb was — literally and figuratively — a carbon copy of Swan’s lightbulb.

Confused yet? But, undoubtedly, there’s more to the lightbulb story. Our understanding is rarely complete. (I’m not even mentioning that Swan’s work was described in an article in Scientific American, a journal certainly within reach of Edison.)

Now, considering the history of the lightbulb, arguably one of the greatest inventions to impact the life of human beings, what do you suppose are the chances that such invention, reinvention, co-invention, etc. go into the relatively insignificant world of magic and magicians?

Just asking.