The development of the tungsten wire industry has been closely linked with the lighting bulb industry from the beginning. In 1878, Edison invented the carbon filament lamp, but it has serious drawbacks that mainly short life. Nearly 20 years later (1897), the carbon filament was replaced by osmium wire and tantalum wire. However, because the melting point of Os and Ta is low, the working temperature and light efficiency are low.

In 1879, Edison tried carbon filament for hundreds of hours. Although carbon has a high melting point, it has a low sublimation temperature. It sublimates directly from solid to gas at low temperature, so it is easy to consume and has a short service life. At present, almost all of the bulbs are used tungsten wire with the melting point of 3410 , the advantage of which is that the sublimation rate is lower when the temperature is lower than the melting point, so it can be heated to a higher temperature than the carbon filament. The tungsten wire also burns in the air, so the bulb needs to be pumped into a vacuum.

To prevent the filament from sublimating, the bulb was filled with inert gases, which are mainly argon and do not contain oxygen, allowing partially vaporized tungsten atoms to return to the filament through collisions. Although the inert gas has increased the filament's service life, however, due to the existence of inert gas in the original vacuum bulb, the heat conduction and convection are increased, the energy is taken away and the equilibrium temperature is reduced, and the faint particles formed by sublimated tungsten gas in the inert gas also form black spots on the inner surface of the bulb by convection.

Hungary made its first tungsten wire in 1903, under the patents of A. Just and FHannaman. The tungsten wire is made by heating the carbon filament to a high temperature by electric current in a halogen oxide vapor containing free hydrogen tungsten, which is completely replaced by tungsten. The resulting incandescent filament contains more or less carbon, which is not only brittle but also compacted when used, so the electric parameters of the filament will change.

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