Plants Art From Old Light Bulbs

In 1882, the first recorded set of miniature incandescent lamps for lighting a Christmas tree was installed. These did not become common in homes for many years.
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 wire, and then osmium, and produced an operating version in 1898. In 1898, he patented the osmium lamp and started marketing it in 1902, the first commercial metal filament incandescent lamp.
In 1897, German physicist and chemist Walther Nernst developed the Nernst lamp, a form of incandescent lamp that used a ceramic globar and did not require enclosure in a vacuum or inert gas. Twice as efficient as carbon filament lamps, Nernst lamps were briefly popular until overtaken by lamps using metal filaments.