Home Made DIY Electric Light Bulb

by sathyanc

2.1K1412

Intro: Home Made DIY Electric Light Bulb

Let's try to make our own, homemade electric light bulb!

STEP 1: Required Things:

The necessary things to make our own electric bulb are:

1. A small support material

2. Aligator clips

3. A 0.5mm graphite pencil needle

4. A Glass Jar

5. An Adaptor to supply power or 8 D-cell batteries.

6. A cello tape

STEP 2: The Making!

You may not have this adaptor so you will need at least 8 D-Cell battery. The battery we used in our old radios. You need to connect all the batteries in series like a line and connect the two ends with an alligator clip.

You may need to cut the support material to fit into the Glass Jar. After that just paste the alligator clips on the sides of the support material.

Now take out a single needle out of the 0.5mm needle box and connect it across the Alligator clips. Now close our setup with a glass jar.

Power on the Adapter if you used it or connect the batteries if you used batteries. The moment you connect the power supply, the needle will get heat up and you could see smoke coming out of it.

Actually, what's happening is, our needle is made up of graphite. Graphite is a conductor. It is made up of carbon atoms. The moment you connect the power supply. The carbon molecules will start eating up the current. After a certain point of time, they cannot eat current anymore. It goes to the excited state. When it goes to the excited state, it will emit the excess current as heat and light. This carbon molecules react with the oxygen molecules in the air and gets converted into carbon dioxide. So it will soon evaporate in the air.

If we are able to create a vacuum inside this jar or if we are able to pass gasses like argon or nitrogen inside this glass jar, we could have stopped graphite from evaporating and our electric bulb would have lighted up for more time. Since we didn't create such an arrangement, this graphite will soon get evaporated and the light will soon go off.

We just saw a small introduction about light bulbs.

In the upcoming instructable, we will try to create the vacuum inside the glass jar and we will take a closer look at the technical details of the light bulb.

See you soon!

STEP 3: Bonus Video!!!


Now that you can make a light bulb on your own.

But, do you how hard it was for people in the early days to invent a practically salable light bulb? Check out the video to watch the Timeline on inventing a light bulb.

STEP 4: Cyberneme

This video is sponsored by Cyberneme Private Limited, an R&D Company on Embedded System Design and Artificial Intelligence.

Check out our channel on YouTube to gain diversified technical knowledge :YouTube/Cyberneme

11 Comments

HALO 2 years ago

My men I will make some modifications to your DIY you can use Screw and nuts to support the Graphite and to clamp them to do it jut drill to hole in the cap then put the Head end at the cap and clamp it using a nut after that use another but and put it a the end turn it until it reaches around 1 centimetre below the end and then put the graphite and Clamp it again using a nut you can use any kind of screw and nuts that conduct electricity.Btw nice instructables I will post the I made it later on after I finished it thank you!!

Stan1y 7 years ago

you could try using baking soda and vinigar to produce a jar full of carbondioxide to start with

sathyanc 7 years ago

Hi @Stan1y. Thanks for your suggestions. I will check it out. It would be awesome, if you could mention some directions on it, here :)

Stan1y 7 years ago

Its a long time since I did any practical chemistry but I think a couple of spoons of bicarbonate and a similar amount of vinegar ought to produce a couple of liters of carbon dioxide which should be enough to purge the production chamber of air and collect a couple of jars of usable carbon dioxide.

I'd start by finding some glass jars and spare lids to fit them. I can see there being a problem with heat conduction in the electrodes supporting the graphite rod, but some how you element and electrodes need to be mounted on one jar lid so it can be screwed on to a jar of carbon dioxide.

the generator fit a length of windscreen washer hose or similar to the lid of a soda bottle put your bicarb in the soda bottle keep the vinegar to one side until you are ready to start.fill a similar soda bottle with water along with 2 or more jars and put them in a bowl or bucket of water along with the lids to the jars put the open end of the hose into the soda bottle in the water. Tip the vinegar into the soda bottle with the bicarb screw the lid on quickly and let the generated gas displace the water in the other soda bottle. this should have purged the generator of air. move the hose to one of the jars and displace all the water from that screw the lid on with the mouth of the jar still under water repeat with the second jar. The initial reaction may well be quite vigorous and cause vinegar to get expelled along with the gas this is not a problem but it is why I'm suggesting kitchen ingredients rather than hydrochloric acid and lime stone. If you have access to 10ml medicine syringes you could probably inject the vinegar a few ml at a time to get a more controlled reaction. hope this is of use.

sathyanc 7 years ago

Hi @Stan1y. Thank you so much for the brief note. I will try this and post my findings. Cheers :)

Stan1y 7 years ago

carbon dioxide being heavier than air you should be able to remove the lid and replace it with the filament assembly with out too much air getting int the jar.

sathyanc 7 years ago

Hi @mrmetallica. It's actually CO2 gas which is a result of graphite molecules getting heated up and evaporate because it's a conductor and we passed electric current more than it could take up!

Swansong 7 years ago

Thanks for sharing :)

sathyanc 7 years ago

Welcome @Swansong :)