Humphry Davy's Arc light
The next few years after Volta’s revolutionary invention, electricians around the world used voltaic piles to produce electrolysis. This eventually enabled the discovery of many new elements and processes to isolate them. Very useful, but not world-changing. Among this new generation of electricians was Humphry Davy. Young, bold, ambitious—and not bound by small-scale experiments—Davy built the biggest battery of his time by filling an entire room in the basement of the Royal Institution with over 800 individual voltaic piles (some sources say two-thousand) around 1808. With this high-voltage source, he produced a blindingly bright arc light which lasted much longer and leaped across much further than any of his previous demonstrations of the principle. With his invention, Davy sparked literally and figuratively the beginning of the era of electricity by finding arguably the most important use that has ever come out of the principle of electricity: artificial light.
Source: Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili, BBC, 2015.
Public Domain
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!