The emergence of electricity, let human productivity get a leap, and the emergence of incandescent lamp, also created the history of human electricity to light.

It is generally believed that the incandescent lamp was invented by the American Thomas Edison, in fact, many other people before Edison also made a lot of contributions to the invention of electric light. In 1801, David, a British chemist, electrified the platinum wire to emit light, and he also invented the electric candle in 1810, using the arc lighting between two carbon rods. In 1854, Henri Goebbels used a charred bamboo wire to glow with electricity under a vacuum glass bottle. His invention today appears to be the first practical incandescent light bulb. The light bulb he was testing had lasted 400 hours, but he did not apply for a design patent in time.

In 1850, the Englishman Joseph Wilson Swan began to study the electric light. In 1878, he received a British patent for a light bulb powered by carbon wires under vacuum, and began to set up companies in England to install electric lights in homes. In 1874, two Canadian electricians applied for a patent for an electric lamp. They fill glass bubbles with helium gas to glow from electrically charged carbon rods. However, they did not have enough money to develop the invention, so they sold the patent to Edison in 1875. Edison bought the patent and tried to improve the filament used. In 1879, he made a carbon filament light bulb, which lasted 13 hours. In 1880, after experimenting with 1,600 materials, Edison finally successfully made the world's first incandescent lamp with a filament made of carbon silk, which successfully maintained 1,200 hours in the laboratory. Since then, humans have entered the era of electric lighting.