Incandescent light bulb development (Edison/Langmuir)

Brief reference. Edison's horsehair filament was superseded by tungsten; GE spent a hundred years perfecting tungsten light bulbs only to have LEDs come along. Used to make the point that engineering investments can be obsoleted by technology transitions.

We're going to talk about design later, but engineering does design. We talked about creating, making something new or different. There's a creative aspect of engineering. Remember the stinky quote at the beginning — if it works but no one knows why, it's engineering. You create it, but you don't — like Edison didn't know why horsehair worked so well. He later found out tungsten was better, and then General Electric spent billions of dollars over the next hundred years perfecting tungsten light bulbs, only to have LEDs come along.