From Fire to LED: A Timeline of Lighting

For a million years light meant a flame. Then, in about 150 years, it went from candles and kerosene to gas, filaments, tubes, HID and LED. Ancient dates are approximate.

1,000,000+

Years of flame-only light

1807

First gas street lights

1879

Practical electric bulb

1993

Bright blue LED unlocks white LED

Timeline

How much light per watt

Typical lumens per watt; rough estimates, flame sources converted from fuel energy.

A candle to a modern LEDRoughly a thousand times more light for the same energy.

The incandescent centuryFrom 1879 to about 2010, most homes ran on filaments that turned around 90 percent of their power into heat.

Discharge lamps took over work spacesFluorescent and HID lit offices, warehouses and roads for 60 years before LED replaced them.

Why the phase-outs happenedEfficiency rules and mercury limits pushed out incandescents, then CFLs and fluorescent tubes.

Two Canadian firstsKerosene was invented by Nova Scotian Abraham Gesner in 1846, and Toronto's Woodward and Evans patented an incandescent bulb in 1874, five years before Edison's famous test.