Joe Biden: Why Don’t We Teach History? ‘A Black Man Invented the Lightbulb, Not a White Guy Named Edison’
During a campaign event today Democratic Party candidate for President Joe Biden said that we as a nation need to teach students more history, then bizarrely claimed a black man invented the light bulb, not Thomas Edison.
“I cannot guarantee everything gets solved in four years, but I guarantee you one thing, it will be a whole heck of a lot better.
“We will move a lot further down the road. Why in God’s name don’t we teach history in history classes? A black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison. Okay? There’s so much. Did anybody know?”
Sorry Joe, nobody knew that a black man invented the lightbulb because that in fact did not happen.
While Thomas Edison was not the only inventor or company working on creating the light bulb Edison was the first to create a practical and inexpensive light bulb.
Via LiveScience.com
Where Edison succeeded and surpassed his competition was in developing a practical and inexpensive light bulb, according to the DOE. Edison and his team of researchers in Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., tested more than 3,000 designs for bulbs between 1878 and 1880. In November 1879, Edison filed a patent for an electric lamp with a carbon filament. The patent listed several materials that might be used for the filament, including cotton, linen and wood. Edison spent the next year finding the perfect filament for his new bulb, testing more than 6,000 plants to determine which material would burn the longest.
Several months after the 1879 patent was granted, Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could burn for more than 1,200 hours. Bamboo was used for the filaments in Edison’s bulbs until it began to be replaced by longer-lasting materials in the 1880s and early 1900s.
In 1882, Lewis Howard Latimer, one of Edison’s researchers, patented a more efficient way of manufacturing carbon filaments. And in 1903, Willis R. Whitney invented a treatment for these filaments that allowed them to burn bright without darkening the insides of their glass bulbs.
That said, no where in my research did I see that a black man created a lightbulb before Edison.
Lewis Latimer, a black man who worked with Edison, was the one who created a more efficient way to manufacture carbon filaments, but while he improved upon Edison’s invention he did not “invent” the lightbulb, as Biden has bizarrely claimed.
It is also a testament to Edison that, given the context of the times, Latimer got credit and the patent for his invention.
Perhaps Biden, or members of team, are the ones who should study history. Either that or Biden’s brain has at least partially turned to mush.
