Is building a lightbulb really trivial? Glass has been around for millennia, but transparent glass wasn’t. If you didn’t have transparent glass, would you know how to make it?
When you say “embed it in glass” do you mean just wrap glass around a wire so the two are in contact? I don’t know what the advantage of that would be. You can get a wire to glow without glass, just pass enough current that it heats up to over 1000C. It would even be visible at about 600C in a completely dark room. If you have the wire in contact with glass you need to keep the temperature below the melting point of glass, which is between about 1400C to 1600C. That probably wouldn’t be better than a candle. Also, that “bulb” wouldn’t last long because of the difference in thermal expansion between metal and glass.
A typical light bulb has two things: space between the glass and the filament, and either a vacuum or something other than oxygen inside. There are 2 reasons for that. One is to allow the filament to get to a temperature that would melt glass. If there’s a space between the two, the filament can get white hot while the glass stays below its melting point. The reason for the argon or vacuum interior is that if you had an oxygen atmosphere the filament would corrode and/or erode quickly. There wouldn’t really be any point in building the “bulb” part of the light bulb without also changing the atmosphere inside the bulb. You probably couldn’t get argon gas in antiquity. You could probably get a partial vacuum, however.
IMO, the “white hot glowing wire” wouldn’t be too difficult if you could build a big enough battery. The “light bulb” would be significantly more challenging.
Is building a lightbulb really trivial? Glass has been around for millennia, but transparent glass wasn’t. If you didn’t have transparent glass, would you know how to make it?
When you say “embed it in glass” do you mean just wrap glass around a wire so the two are in contact? I don’t know what the advantage of that would be. You can get a wire to glow without glass, just pass enough current that it heats up to over 1000C. It would even be visible at about 600C in a completely dark room. If you have the wire in contact with glass you need to keep the temperature below the melting point of glass, which is between about 1400C to 1600C. That probably wouldn’t be better than a candle. Also, that “bulb” wouldn’t last long because of the difference in thermal expansion between metal and glass.
A typical light bulb has two things: space between the glass and the filament, and either a vacuum or something other than oxygen inside. There are 2 reasons for that. One is to allow the filament to get to a temperature that would melt glass. If there’s a space between the two, the filament can get white hot while the glass stays below its melting point. The reason for the argon or vacuum interior is that if you had an oxygen atmosphere the filament would corrode and/or erode quickly. There wouldn’t really be any point in building the “bulb” part of the light bulb without also changing the atmosphere inside the bulb. You probably couldn’t get argon gas in antiquity. You could probably get a partial vacuum, however.
IMO, the “white hot glowing wire” wouldn’t be too difficult if you could build a big enough battery. The “light bulb” would be significantly more challenging.