The whole story of… light bulbs

Such was the importance of the light bulb — or lamp, as it is known to engineers — that the expression has entered into the language as a synonym for invention. Yet its road to supremacy was an untidy street fight dominated by one man — Thomas Alva Edison — who, for all his visionary prowess and business acumen, could not have predicted that a century later, his development of an idea that lit up the world would be rendered virtually obsolete by the emergence of light-emitting diode technology.