“Well, we sent out and bought some cotton thread, carbonized it, and made the first filament. We had already managed to get pretty high vacua, and we thought, maybe, the filament would be stable. We built the lamp and turned on the current. It lit up, and in the first few breathless minutes we measured its resistance quickly and found it was 275 ohms--all we wanted. Then we sat down and looked at that lamp. We wanted to see how long it would burn. The problem was solved--if the filament would last. The day was--let me see--October 21, 1879. We sat and looked, and the lamp continued to burn, and the longer it burned the more fascinated we were. None of us could go to bed, and there was no sleep for any of us for forty hours. We sat and just watched it with anxiety growing into elation. It lasted about forty-five hours, and then I said, If it will burn that number of hours now, I know I can make it burn a hundred.’ We saw that carbon was what we wanted, and the next question was what kind of carbon. I began to try various things, and finally I carbonized a strip of bamboo from a Japanese fan, and saw that I was on the right track. But we had a rare hunt finding the real thing. I sent a schoolmaster to Sumatra and another fellow up the Amazon, while William H. Moore, one of my associates, went to Japan and got what we wanted there. We made a contract with an old Jap to supply us with the proper fibre, and that man went to work and cultivated and cross-fertilized bamboo until he got exactly the quality we required.” This is the inventor’s own statement, but it gives a very meagre notion of the many months’ experimenting in his workshop while he hunted for a suitable filament for his electric light. As he said, after he had first seen the Brush light, and studied it, he decided that the main problem was one of distribution, and thereupon considered whether he should use the incandescent or the voltaic arc in the system he was planning. At last he decided in favor of the incandescent light.