Tungsten bulbs

Hungarian advertising of the Tungsram-bulb from 1904. This was the first light bulb that used a filament made from tungsten instead of carbon. The inscription reads: wire lamp with a drawn wire – indestructible.

On 13 December 1904, Hungarian Sándor Just and Croatian Franjo Hanaman were granted a Hungarian patent (No. 34541) for a tungsten filament lamp that lasted longer and gave brighter light than the carbon filament. Tungsten filament lamps were first marketed by the Hungarian company Tungsram in 1904. This type is often called Tungsram-bulbs in many European countries.^[37] Their experiments also showed that the luminosity of bulbs filled with an inert gas was higher than in vacuum.^[38] The tungsten filament outlasted all other types.
In 1906, the General Electric Company patented a method of making filaments from sintered tungsten and in 1911, used ductile tungsten wire for incandescent light bulbs.
In 1913, Irving Langmuir found that filling a lamp with inert gas instead of a vacuum resulted in twice the luminous efficacy and reduction of bulb blackening. In 1924, Marvin Pipkin, an American chemist, patented a process for frosting the inside of lamp bulbs without weakening them, and in 1947, he patented a process for coating the inside of lamps with silica.
Between 1924 and the outbreak of the Second World War, the Phoebus cartel attempted to fix prices and sales quotas for bulb manufacturers outside of North America.
In 1930, Hungarian Imre Bródy filled lamps with krypton gas rather than argon, and designed a process to obtain krypton from air. Production of krypton filled lamps based on his invention started at Ajka in 1937, in a factory co-designed by Polányi and Hungarian-born physicist Egon Orowan.^[39]
By 1964, improvements in efficiency and production of incandescent lamps had reduced the cost of providing a given quantity of light by a factor of thirty, compared with the cost at introduction of Edison's lighting system.^[40]
Consumption of incandescent light bulbs grew rapidly in the US. In 1885, an estimated 300,000 general lighting service lamps were sold, all with carbon filaments. When tungsten filaments were introduced, about 50 million lamp sockets existed in the US. In 1914, 88.5 million lamps were used, (only 15% with carbon filaments), and by 1945, annual sales of lamps were 795 million (more than 5 lamps per person per year).^[41]