Alexander Lodygin

Alexander Lodygin was a Russian electrical engineer who developed one of the earliest working incandescent light bulbs, demonstrating a carbon-rod filament sealed in an evacuated glass globe in 1872 and receiving a Russian patent in 1874, several years before Thomas Edison's more commercially successful incandescent lamp. Lodygin later experimented with filaments made of refractory metals, and his early patents on tungsten filament construction were eventually acquired by General Electric, whose tungsten-filament bulbs became the industry standard for most of the twentieth century.