It was very much a startup. Then came consolidation and mergers, resulting in General Electric.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Manufactures-1875-1900-Com...
It's in the Stanford libraries, or at least was when I read it years ago.
Also useful is "Men and Volts", an official history of General Electric.[2]
From an investment perspective, it's worth reading the early history of the electrical industry, because it's very much like the history of the computer industry. Just a century earlier. You get to see something go from cutting edge technology with high margins to dull and boring with low margins, over half a century. You get to see the transition from thousands of little companies to a few big ones.
As you keep going into the radio era, you see the transition from paid services to ad-supported ones. It will all look very familiar.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Manufacturers-1875-1900-St...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Men-volts-story-General-electric/dp/B...
https://archive.org/details/electricalmanufa0000unse
Do not forget about the library in Archive.org ...
Adding a third connection through the glass to an electrode a distance away from the hot filament was found to conduct some current across that space and was dubbed the Edison effect.
Which is what vacuum tubes are largely based on.
> Why go for this very broad market first? Why not build smaller generators in the basement of department stores, lighting up just single buildings or single streets?
Generators are noisy and dirty. At that time they were powered by coal. It would take some extensive modifications to a building to put one in a basement, if it were even possible. Probably it wouldn't have been worth it just for an extra hour or two of people shopping.
IIRC, a few wealthy people (I think JP Morgan, who was a big investor in both Edison and Westinghouse) installed generators at their homes so they could host dinner parties and show off the electric lights, but they did complain about the noise and the fumes.
-- Passer, Harold - The electrical manufacturers, 1875-1900 : a study in competition, entrepreneurship, technical change, and economic growth
https://archive.org/details/electricalmanufa0000unse
-- Hammond; Pound - Men and volts; the story of General electric
https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich
-- Jonnes, Jill - Empires of light : Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the race to electrify the world
None. Its a hardware problem.
Making tungsten wire wasn't easy. Cast tungsten is brittle. There's a tricky powder metallurgy process which can produce ductile wire that can be coiled.
All our power comes from renewables and nuclear, to a rough approximation, so if you're turning wind and rain or really excited neutrons into electricity you're not emitting things that change the climate. Converting that into a lot of heat along with light isn't worse for the environment than converting into not a lot of head and light, even if it means using more electricity.
What about the lamps themselves?
An LED lightbulb is a technological marvel made of a bunch of different plastics, fibreglass, copper, bismuth and tin for the solder, gallium arsenide in the LEDs, tantalum in the capacitors, assembled in huge factories using processes involving all sorts of hideous chemicals and a terrifying amount of energy.
On the other hand, an incandescent lightbulb is a milk bottle with a coil of wire in it and all the air sucked out.
Again, to a very rough approximation, something you can make in a blacksmith's forge is probably going to be better overall for the environment than something that requires a multi-billion pound factory.
Go renewable, and go incandescent.
When this happens, you might have a point.
> An LED lightbulb is a technological marvel made of a bunch of different plastics, fibreglass, copper, bismuth
But so is solar panel so you need to make sure you're not using these.
98% of the energy here comes from renewables. The 2% that doesn't comes from nuclear, with fossil fuels providing something like 1/50th of a percent.
Why are you all so far behind?
> huge factories using processes involving all sorts of hideous chemicals and a terrifying amount of energy.
As opposed to lightbulbs, which are all handcrafted by artisans using no chemicals or energy?
A whole sort of subtle health effects are related to light.
