• Since the world began, people used the sun as their main source of light.
• 70,000BC A whole rock or shell or other natural found objects was filled with moss or a similar material that was soaked in animal fat and then ignited
• circa 3000 BC candles are invented.
• circa 400 BC oil lamps
• 1780 Aimé Argand invents central draught fixed oil lamp
• 1784 Argand adds glass chimney to central draught lamp
• 1792 William Murdoch begins experimenting with gas lighting and probably produced the first gas light in this year.
• 1802 William Murdoch illuminated the exterior of the Soho Foundry with gas.
• 1805 Phillips and Lee's Cotton Mill, Manchester was the first industrial factory to be fully lit by gas.
• 1813 National Heat and Light Company formed by Fredrich Winzer (Winsor).
• c. 1802 Humphry Davy demonstrates arc-lighting in free air.
• 1815 Humphry Davy invents the miner's safety lamp.
• 1835 James Bowman Lindsay demonstrates a light bulb based electric lighting system to the citizens of Dundee.
• 1840 first kerosene lamps (oil lamps that burn fuel from petroleum)
• 1841 Arc-lighting used as experimental public lighting in Paris
• 1853 Ignacy Lukasiewicz invents petrol lamp
• 1854 Heinrich Gobel invents the first incandescent lamp by passing an electric current through a carbonized bamboo filament that was placed inside of a glass bulb
• 1856 glassblower Heinrich Geissler confines the electric arc in a tube.
• 1867 A. E. Becquerel demonstrates the first fluorescent lamp
• 1875 Henry Woodward patents the electric light bulb.
• 1876 Pavel Yablochkov invents the Yablochkov candle, the first practical carbon arc lamp, for public street lighting in Paris.
• 1879 Thomas Edison and Joseph Wilson Swan patent the carbon-thread incandescent lamp.
• 1880 Edison produced a 16 watt lightbulb that lasts 1500 hours.
• c. 1889 Incandescent gas mantle invented, revolutionises gas lighting.
• 1893 Nikola Tesla uses cordless low pressure gas discharge lamps, powered by a high frequency electric field, to light his laboratory. He displays fluorescent lamps and neon lamps at the World Columbian Exposition.
• 1894 D. McFarlane Moore creates the Moore tube, precursor of electric gas-discharge lamps.
• 1897 Walther Nernst invents and patents his incandescent lamp, based on solid state electrolytes.
• 1901 Peter Cooper Hewitt demonstrates the mercury-vapor lamp.
• 1911 Georges Claude develops the neon lamp.
• 1925 The first frosted lightbulbs were produced.
• 1926 Edmund Germer patents the fluorescent lamp.
• 1962 Nick Holonyak Jr. develops the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode
• 1991 Philips invents a fluorescent lightbulb that lasts 60,000 hours. The bulb uses magnetic induction.
• 1994 First commercial sulfur lamp.

Technology timelines | Lamps | Lighting | Graphical timelines