I don't collect or know anything about bulbs, but here's some manufacturing history. The exhaustion of the air from the lamps by mercury pumps in 1881 required from four to six hours (diehl had a pump installed in his attic for experiments)This was reduced to half an hour in 1895. a better result is secured today by simple piston pump and chemical exhaust in one minute (1903). The glass working operations have all been changed from hand and mouth labor by glass blowers of special skill to machine work done by unskilled labor so that the labor cost of the glass item is barely ten per cent of what it was in 82. in the best known of the early lamps split bamboo was used for the filament. each piece requiring eight seperate hand operations.(Of interest was the fact that Newton Harrison one time associate of Edison wrote that he may have been the first person to hook a fan blade to an electric motor,. he did this to speed up the carbonization. squirted cellulose is now used. in one large factory where this employs 83 operators, the retention of the obsolete bamboo methods would have necessicated the employment of over 2,150 workers moveover the lamp of 25 years ago had .30 times as much platinum in it as now and platinum outranks gold for expensiveness. early lamps consumed about one hundred watts for sixteen candle power. today the standard filament lamp takes only fifty watts for the same candles.
