Pacific service magazine . arge number of cells of his battery, helighted the auditorium of the Royal Insti-tution with these lamps during one of thelectures he gave. The demonstration wasonly of scientific interest, the cost of currentbeing much too great (estimated at severalhundred dollars a kilowatt hour) to makeit commercial. Thomas Wright, an Englishman, wasthe first to patent an arc lamp. This wasin 1845. In the same year J. W. Starr, anAmerican, obtained a patent in England onlamps he had invented. During the ^earsthat followed several inventors developedarc lamp mechanisms. In 1876 Pa
Pacific service magazine . arge number of cells of his battery, helighted the auditorium of the Royal Insti-tution with these lamps during one of thelectures he gave. The demonstration wasonly of scientific interest, the cost of currentbeing much too great (estimated at severalhundred dollars a kilowatt hour) to makeit commercial. Thomas Wright, an Englishman, wasthe first to patent an arc lamp. This wasin 1845. In the same year J. W. Starr, anAmerican, obtained a patent in England onlamps he had invented. During the ^earsthat followed several inventors developedarc lamp mechanisms. In 1876 Paul Jab-lochkoff, a Russian army officer and engi-neer, invented the electric candle, whichconsisted of two rods of carbon placed sideby side but separated by insulating mate-rial. Severalboulevards inParis wereequipped withthese lamps. In this countryWilliam Wal-lace, associatedwith ProfessorMoses G. Far-mer, Charles and Ed-ward Weston, in-vented completesystems of arcA vivid example—Niagara Falls lamps and dyna-. 52 Pacific Service Magazine mos. In 1878 the Thomson-Houston sys-tem was perfected. By this time the arclamp was commercially established andused for street lighting. Thomas A. Edison became interested inthe electric lighting problem in 1878. Hedevoted his attention to platinum as alight-giving element, but he found thatwhile platinum had the required high melt-ing point it was too expensive to be usedcommercially and so recourse was had to afilament of carbon. This was cheap andpractically non-fusible, but would be con-sumed at a much lower temperature thanthat required for incandescence. This madeit necessary to enclose the filament in anexhausted globe or bulb. Thus sprang intobeing the electric incandescent lamp. Thefirst successful lamp was made in October,1879, and burned for forty-five hours be-fore it failed. The following month thelamp had been so greatly improved uponthat it burned for several hundred hours,and in December a public exhibition of th
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