Alexander Lodygin
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Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin (October 18, 1847 – March 16, 1923) (Александр Николаевич Лодыгин in Russian) was a Russian electrical engineer and inventor, one of inventors of the Incandescent light bulb.
Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin was born in village Stenshino', Tambov guberniya, Russia. His parents were of a very old and noble family (descendants of Andrei Kobyla like Romanovs), but of very moderate means. He studied at the Tambov Cadet School (1859-1865). Then he served in the 71st Belev regiment, and in 1866-1868 studied at the Moscow Infantry School. Soon after graduation from his military school he retired from the military and worked as a worker at the Tula weapons factory.
In 1872 he decided to go to Saint Petersburg to attend lectures at Saint Petersburg Institute of Technology and to start working on an electrical helicopter (electrolet). The electrical helicopter would need some sort of artificial lighting that would have to be electrical. He decided to start his helicopter work by developing a source of electrical light for it.
On July 11, 1874, Lodygin was granted Russian patent number 1619 (which he applied for in 1872) for his filament lamp. He also patented this invention in Austria, Britain, France, and Belgium. For a filament, Lodygin used a very thin carbon rod, placed under a bell-glass. In August of 1873 he demonstrated prototypes of his electric filament lamp in the physics lecture hall of the Saint Petersburg Institute of Technology. In 1873–1874 he conducted experiments with electric lighting on ships, city streets, etc. In 1874, the Petersburg Academy of Sciences awarded him with a Lomonosov Prize for his invention of the filament lamp. That same year, Lodygin established “Electric Lighting Company, A.N. Lodygin and Co”. In 1899, Petersburg Institute of Electrical Engineering awarded Lodygin with the honorary title of electrical engineer.
From 1875 he became very interested in the socialist ideas of the Narodniks. In the 1880s after Narodniks killed Emperor Alexander II of Russia, there were repressions against their organization. Thus, in 1884 he had to emigrate from Russia to France and USA. In 1895 he married German reporter Alma Schmidt, the daughter of an electrical engineer.
In the 1890s, Lodygin invented a few types of filament lamps with metallic filaments; some say he was the first scientist to use a tungsten filament. He got a patent for lamps with tungsten filaments and sold it to General Electric (1906), who began the first industrial production of such lamps.
In 1907 Lodygin returned to Russia. He continued work on a series of his inventions, including a new type of electrical motor, electrical welding, tungsten alloys, electrical ovens and smelting furnaces. He taught at Petersburg Institute of Electrical Engineering and worked for the Petersburg railroad. In 1914 he was sent by the Ministry of Agriculture to develop plans for electrification of Olonets and Nizhny Novgorod gubernias.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Lodygin emigrated to USA. He declined a Soviet offer to work for their State Plan for Electrification of Russia (1918). He died in Brooklyn in 1923.
Lodygin's ideas were almost always ahead of his time. He invented an incandescent light bulb before Edison, but it was not commercially profitable. The lamp with a tungsten filament is indeed the only design used now, but in 1906 they were too expensive. His diving apparatus is very similar to modern scuba equipment. Even his ideas for an electrical helicopter were used many years later by Igor Sikorsky.
