The real need was for a practical electric light. In 1846, rather out of the blue, a man named Frederick Hale Holmes patented an electric arc lamp. Holmes’s light was made by generating a strong electric current and forcing it to jump between two carbon rods—a trick that the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy had demonstrated but not capitalized on more than forty years earlier. In Holmes’s hands the result was a blindingly bright light. Almost nothing is known about Holmes—where he came from, what his educational background was, how he learned to master electricity. All that is known is that he
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