The search for a filament
Edison and his team at Menlo Park tried thousands of materials, from platinum to bamboo. A carbon filament in a vacuum kept glowing. It was later replaced by tungsten, which lasted much longer.
Electrification
A light bulb was useless without electricity in the house. So in 1882 Edison opened the first commercial central power station in New York. Towns, and later villages, were electrified gradually over several decades.
The end of the light bulb
A traditional incandescent bulb turns only about 5% of its energy into light; the rest is heat. The European Union therefore phased them out step by step, and they were replaced by LED lights, which use a fraction of the energy.