The true victory lap for Edison didn’t come with that bamboo filament glowing in a vacuum; it came with the lighting of the Pearl Street district two years later. To make that happen, you needed to invent lightbulbs, yes, but you also needed a reliable source of electric current, a system for distributing that current through a neighborhood, a mechanism for connecting individual lightbulbs to the grid, and a meter to gauge how much electricity each household was using. A lightbulb on its own is a curiosity piece, something to dazzle reporters with. What Edison and the muckers created was much
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