Picture this... a light bulb in the barn burns out. A 30-year-old assesses the situation and rewires the barn himself, with more and brighter lights. A 40-year-old hires an electrician to upgrade the ...

From Edison’s early experiments to our fluorescent future, TIME takes a look back at the bulb’s brightest moments Thomas Edison was not the sole inventor of the incandescent lightbulb, nor was he the ...