Originally posted by Off_The_Street
"The battery has been recreated and found to actually worked."
Postulating that there really was a working battery, (and I think it's safe to assume so), most of the articles I 've read say it was probably used
as an electro-plating tool. Building a light bulb, including machining a hard metal, drawing a vacuum , etc. is a lot bigger step than putting
vinegar and bronze in a jar and sealing it with pitch.
Years ago, I read an article in Poptronics magazine that proposed that the pyramids as radio towers. Personally, I find that a little far fetched;
also in the article was a very possible description of how a an ancient Egyptian lightbulb could be created.
Electrical wires would have been easy to make, just make a small ingot of copper, file a taper at one end and draw the ingot through progressively
smaller holes in a drawplate, until it is the desired gauge. (a method thousands of years old, that modern metalsmiths and jewelers still use today,
I should know , I am a metalsmith/jeweler)
The stand could be made of clay/ceramic (lighter and less heat conductive than metal, less prone to catching fire than wood).
The egyptians would certainly have been capable of creating a glass bulb, which doesn't necessarily need to be transparent, merely translucent.
Perhaps the wire were dipped in bitumen as insulation?
The filament would have been a thick, serpentine, copper rod, dipped repeatedly in a paste of lime powder and water.
Lime powder was the main component of the old limelight
that were still used by stage actors as late as
As one final nugget of trivia, the term "limelight" comes from the incandescent light produced by a rod of lime bathed in a flame of oxygen and
hydrogen. At the time it was invented, limelight was the brightest source of artificial light known. One of it's first uses was for lighting theater
stages, and actors and actresses were keen to position themselves "in the limelight" so as to be seen to their best effect.
The egyptian limelight would have incandesced due to the heat and electricity transmitted from the batteries direct current, through the wires,
into the filament. The heating of lime causes it to glow; the hotter the flame, the brighter the light.