This is an excerpt from The Breakdown newspaper. To read the full article, register.
“There was no electric moment in the light bulb story.”
– Steven Johnson, How We Got Here
The light bulb has come to be associated with the terrifying flash of inspiration – the moment when a well-defined idea enters the designer’s head, prompting the exclamation “Eureka!”
This is not how the light bulb was designed, however.
Thomas Edison, known as Thomas Edison, the light bulb was developed over 100 years of trial and error by many experts around the world.
Electric light was first demonstrated by Humphry Davy in 1802.
The closed bulb method was invented by Warren de la Rue in 1840.
Thomas Edison was born in 1847.
Many others contributed before and after 1847 – historian Arthur Bright list about a dozen people as co-founders of the light bulb, and Edison’s work represents its end, not its beginning.
“Edison’s light bulb was not just a single invention made as a bricolage of miniature controllers,” Steven Johnson writes in How We Got Here.
Edison’s greatest contribution to bricolage was in the late 1870s the invention of carbonized bamboo filament that eventually made light bulbs long-lasting, safe for domestic use, and commercial.
But even then, Edison was forced by the patent courts to share credit with Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, whose lamp design was known to be the first to light a private home (his) and a public building (Savoy Theatre).
Hence the portmanteau name for the “Ediswan incandescent lamp” that consumers were given from around the 1880s.
The preservation of the light bulb does not detract from Edison’s achievements as an inventor.
On the contrary – because Edison did something greater than bring enlightenment to the masses: He developed the ability to create.
“Edison didn’t just invent the invention,” Johnson explains, “he invented an entire invention, a system that would dominate 20th-century commerce.”
This system encouraged the proliferation of R&D companies’ laboratories: groups of different experts who support each other in problems, share funds, take external ideas, and freely encourage each other’s work – a type of “new network” that is much more powerful than the popular image of the lone inventor.
That, Johnson says, is a real lesson to be learned from the story of the light bulb.
“If we think that innovation comes from a single expert who creates a new technology from scratch, that model leads us to other options, such as strong patent protection.
And maybe crypto, too?
Crypto is the first and most important way to promote the kind of open, integrated infrastructure that builds a strong network.
Edison proved that cooperation trumps isolation, but his corporate model still relied on patents to maintain control.
In contrast, the most flexible networks in history – Roman roads, fixed-point carriers, the Internet, GPS – worked differently: they were open, license-free that anyone could build on.
Christian Catalini makes a case for crypto and repeating history on this open network: “Money,” he says, “is the last closed channel.”
And crypto is an open system, so that everyone can benefit: “Innovation without permission will always make more profit than a closed system,” he concludes.
At the end of a disappointing year for crypto-source, it’s important to remember how powerful this network can be.
There was no light bulb moment in the light bulb story – and there won’t be a moment when crypto “arrives” either.
All of these are products of network technology that only realize their full potential when they are networked – the lamp was just a glass ornament until it was plugged into the power grid.
Crypto is creating a digital economic grid – an open, permissionless environment waiting for the next big idea to set it up and turn it on.
Suppose it happens in 2026.
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