Electro-Dynamic Light Company

Man, an attorney from New York City, supplied money for experimentation to Sawyer, an electrical engineer.

Other features of the system were that safety devices were built in to prevent the early destroying of the other electric lamps in the circuit should there be a power surge due to a lamp burning up early and leaving the distribution circuit.

[10] The company had a patent for an electrical distribution system of which Sawyer filed June 27, 1877, and which was granted August 14, 1877.

The invention consisted of an arrangement and combination of parts whereby it enabled to place several electric lights with carbon filaments in a single circuit and to get rid of the use of arcing carbon points normally employed in electric lights at the time.

The purpose of the electric current was to heat to incandescence a filament wire in a glass bulb that had an inert gas and a glowing light resulted.

[10] The company was the first in the United States specifically organized for the manufacture and sale of incandescent electric light bulbs.

[18] The same exhibition was mentioned several weeks later in a newspaper of Princeton, Minnesota,[19] and Bismarck, North Dakota.

[20] The lamp was described as a strip of pencil carbon graphite connected with two wires to an electric generator.

The carbon strip was in a hermetically sealed glass bulb that was filled with nitrogen gas.

Since there was no oxygen in the glass globe the carbon filament did not burn out and produced light instead when it got hot.

[21] The demonstration consisted of five electric light bulbs hanging from chandeliers in an office building at the corner of Elm and Walker streets.

It was later referred back to the Examiner of Interferences on the request of Edison who indicated that he had new testimony to offer that was relevant and should be looked at.

He held that Man and Sawyer must be adjudged to be the prior inventors of the electric light, as was already decided twice before.

[28][29] This settled permanently the long contested conflict over the question of who was first in the invention of the arch-shaped fibrous carbon filament electric lamp, which occupied the attention of the U.S. Patent Office for nearly five years to make this final determination.