Edison's most famous invention is the electric light bulb, which he 'invented' and patented in 1879. Unfortunately for Edison, in the previous year, the Sunderland-born chemist Joseph Swan (1828-1914) invented and patented virtually the same light bulb. Swan's findings were published in the US journal Scientific America and Edison was almost certainly a reader of this publication. Edison made a slight improvement, replacing Swan's carbon filament with bamboo, but to all intents and purposes, it was Swan's invention. [continued]
As to "Edison was almost certainly a reader of this publication":
"It was in this situation that Swan had read the enthusiastic, and at times extravagant, claims coming from America. By the end of 1879 he could keep quiet no longer and on 1 January 1880, the day after the exited crowds had been walking the streets of menlo Park, a letter appeared over Swan's name in
Nature.
Fifteen years ago I used charred paper and card in the construction of an electric lamp on the incandescent principle. I used it too in the shape of a horse-shoe precisely as you say Mr. Edison is now using it. I did not then succeed in obtaining the durability which I was in search of, but I have since made many experiments and within the last six months I have, I believe, completely conquored the difficulty which lead to the previous failure, and am now able to produce a perfectly durable electric lamp by means of incandescent carbons.
"Edison, reading Swan's letter, commented with unjustified skepticism: 'There you have it. No sooner does a fellow succeed in making a good thing than some other fellow pops up and tells you they did it years ago.' "Then, claims Francis Jehl, Edison and Upton spent two days searching for details of Swan's work until they at last discovered an article about him in the
Scientific American of the previous July. To judge by Jehl, Edison had got rather out of touch."
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Edison, The Man Who Made The Future by Ronald W. Clark pp. 102-103
Although Swan got the jump on Edison with this version of the bulb, the comment by the person in that Cook interview who says that Edison almost certainly read
Scientific American seems to imply Edison was familiar with Swan's work and got his ideas from him. In fact, they invented essentially the same bulb, but completely independently of each other with no knowledge of what the other was doing. This is remarkably common in the history of discovery and invention. I think it was Joseph Henry who discovered electromagnetic induction several years before Faraday, (but there was no way Faraday could have know that since Henry never bothered to publish it.)
Edison was extremely poor at getting his inventions from the first working models to commercially viable products try as he might. In retrospect his main contribution was as a breaker of psychological barriers about what was possible. There were a lot of respected physicists back then, most notably Rutherford, who didn't believe it was possible to produce an incandescent lamp that would last more than a couple hours. Also, his tinny short-lived recordings, unsatisfying as they were, never-the-less proved for the first time that sound
could be recorded. It fell to others to figure out how to do it well, but Edison was the first to do it at all.
