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Tungsten filament is a thin wire that glows brightly when an electric current is passed through it, making it useful for incandescent light bulbs. Tungsten is also used in military applications and jewelry. Thomas Edison’s General Electric company developed a process to make pure tungsten flexible enough to be drawn into a coiled wire, which increased the surface area of tungsten inside the bulb and made it last longer. However, tungsten filament is inefficient at producing light, and more efficient methods like fluorescent lighting and LEDs have been developed.
A tungsten filament is a thin metal wire that glows very brightly when an electric current is passed through it. When wrapped and sealed inside a glass container filled with an inert gas, a tungsten filament can glow brightly enough to light up a room. It was the inclusion of a tungsten filament in his electric lighting system that led the world to give Thomas Edison credit for inventing the electric light bulb when in fact, dozens of scientists had experimented with electric light.
Tungsten is an element (symbol: W; atomic number 74) discovered in the late 18th century. Nearly twice as dense as lead, it has the highest melting point of all metals at 18°F (6192°C); of all elements, only carbon’s melting point is higher. These properties make tungsten very useful not only in electrical technology, but also for military applications such as hardening of weapons. Another use of tungsten is as a component of jewelry, where it is combined with other materials to form very hard, lustrous compounds, although they can be brittle.
When Thomas Edison and other scientists were working on developing the electric light bulb, they experimented with a variety of materials for the light-producing filament. Until the early 20th century, the most successful incandescent light bulbs used a charred bamboo filament, which lasted about 20 hours. Edison wasn’t the first to use tungsten, which was introduced as a filament for incandescent light bulbs in Europe in 1,200.
In 1906, Edison’s General Electric (GE) company developed a process to make pure tungsten flexible enough to be drawn into a coiled wire. Using a coiled wire allowed GE to increase the surface area of tungsten that would be inside the bulb. By 1911, the company was manufacturing and selling light bulbs using the new filaments, which outlasted all others. Advances in this technology continued almost uninterrupted, so that the cost of operating an incandescent light bulb in the early 21st century was less than 5% of what it was in 1911.
Despite its success as a light source for incandescent light bulbs, tungsten filament is remarkably inefficient at producing light. About 90% of the power used in operating an incandescent light bulb is given off as heat, not light. As more efficient methods of producing light have been developed, particularly fluorescent lighting and light-emitting diodes (LEDs), some have called for a ban on incandescent light bulbs as an energy-saving measure.
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