You might think that the everyday light bulb is the most common type of lighting today, but actually--if you count all the offices and factories in the United States--the fluorescent lamp outshines the incandescent light bulb as our main source of electric lighting. The introduction of the fluorescent lamp in 1936 was staged with great drama at the U.S. Patent Office's 100th anniversary celebration, where more than 1,000 people were gathered in a hotel ballroom. Just when the names of America's twelve greatest inventors were being announced, the room was flooded with brilliant fluorescent light. The invention of the lamp resulted from the work of many different scientists over a long period of time, beginning in the 1600s with the discovery of a substance that would glow in the dark after exposure to the sun. The visible glow produced by materials exposed to ultraviolet rays was later...