Vacuum applications: the Edison incandescent light bulb lamp

Thomas Edison filed his first patent application for "Improvement In Electric Lights" on October 14, 1878 (U.S. Patent 0,214,636). After many the experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22, 1879, and lasted 13.5 hours. Edison continued to improve this design and by Nov 4, 1879, filed for a U.S. patent (granted as U.S. Patent 0,223,898 on Jan 27, 1880) for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires". Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.
The United States Patent Office gave a ruling October 8, 1883, that Edison's patents were based on the prior art of William Sawyer and were invalid. Litigation continued for a number of years. Eventually on October 6, 1889, a judge ruled that Edison's electric light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of high resistance" was valid. In the 1890s, the Austrian inventor Carl Auer von Welsbach worked on metal-filament mantles, first with platinum wiring, and then osmium, and produced an operative version in 1898. In 1898 he patented the osmium lamp and started marketing it in 1902, the first commercial metal filament. On December 13 1904, Croatians Aleksandar Just and Franjo Hanamanwere granted a Hungarian patent (No. 34541) for a tungsten filament lamp, which lasted longer and gave a brighter light than the carbon filament. Tungsten filament lamps were first marketed by the Hungarian company Tungsram in 1905, so this type is often called Tungsram-bulbs in many European countries.
In 1913 Irving Langmuir found that filling a lamp with inert gas instead of a vacuum resulted in twice the luminous efficacy and reduction of bulb blackening.
Nowadays incandescent light bulbs consist of a glass bulb with a filament of tungsten wire inside the bulb, through which an electric current is passed. The bulb is first evacuated and then filled with an inert gas such as argon to reduce evaporation of the filament.
An electrical current heats the filament to typically 2000 K to 3300 K, well below tungsten's melting point of 3695 K (6192°F). Filament temperatures depend on the filament type, shape, size, and amount of current drawn. The heated filament emits light that approximates a continuous spectrum. The useful part of the emitted energy is visible light, but most energy is given off as heat in the near-infrared wavelengths.
In order to improve the efficiency of the lamp, the filament usually consists of coils of fine wire, also known as a "coiled coil". The advantage of the coiled coil is that evaporation of the tungsten filament is at the rate of a tungsten cylinder having a diameter equal to that of the coiled coil. Due to the coils creating gaps, such a filament has a lower surface area than the perceived surface area of the filament, and so evaporation is reduced. If the filament is then run hotter to bring back evaporation to the same rate, the resulting filament is a more efficient light source.

If a light bulb envelope leaks, the hot tungsten filament reacts with air, yielding an aerosol of brown tungsten nitride, brown tungsten dioxide, violet-blue tungsten pentoxide, and yellow tungsten trioxide which then deposits on the nearby surfaces or the bulb interior.
In a conventional lamp, the evaporated tungsten eventually condenses on the inner surface of the glass envelope, darkening it. For bulbs that contain a vacuum, the darkening is uniform across the entire surface of the envelope. When a filling of inert gas is used, the evaporated tungsten is carried in the thermal convection currents of the gas, depositing preferentially on the uppermost part of the envelope and blackening just that portion of the envelope. A very small amount of water vapor inside a light bulb can significantly affect lamp darkening. Water vapor dissociates into hydrogen and oxygen at the hot filament. The oxygen attacks the tungsten metal, and the resulting tungsten oxide particles travel to cooler parts of the lamp. Hydrogen from water vapor reduces the oxide, reforming water vapor and continuing this water cycle.