Whose invention was the light bulb?

The light bulb was not the work of a single inventor but the culmination of many efforts, though Thomas Edison is the name most associated with it. Edison and his team in the United States produced the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, using a carbon filament that could glow for many hours, and just as importantly, Edison developed an entire system of electricity generation and distribution to make electric lighting usable. Around the same time, the British scientist Joseph Swan independently developed a working incandescent bulb, and the two later joined forces in Britain. Earlier inventors, including Humphry Davy, had demonstrated electric light decades before, but their versions were impractical. Edison genius lay as much in refining and commercialising the technology as in the bulb itself, bringing affordable electric light to homes and cities.