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.