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This is a hot button issue. The short answer is that the light bulb came first. Working models of the light bulb had been floating around for several decades before Alexander Bell held the world's first bossy phone call in 1876: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." Several sites in the Yahoo! Alexander Graham Bell category claim that the clever Scotsman invented the "electrical speech machine," or the telephone, in 1876. But he certainly benefited from the research of others before him, including a German inventor named Phillip Reis, who worked
on early prototypes in the 1860s. But here's the difference -- Bell's phone actually worked. The light bulb question is trickier. Thomas Alva Edison patented the light bulb in 1879 (three years after the telephone), but it was not a new invention. Various working versions of the lightbulb had been around for a good 50 years. A British inventor named Joseph Swan unveiled a carbon filament light bulb in New Castle, England, a full ten years before Edison's patent was issued. Global politics aside, it's safe to say that the light bulb was first. As for who invented it,
we'll leave that up to your patriotic inclinations.
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