This is a 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

About an hour east of Oakland

in the town of Livermore, California,

hanging in the garage of Fire Station Number 6,

there's a small pear-shaped light bulb. The light bulb is on right

now. It's glowing and it's been glowing with just a couple of momentary interruptions

for 113 years.

Oh, there it is.

We're looking at the longest continuously burning light bulb in the world,

in the Guinness Book of World Records,

and it was installed in 1901.

We send our producer Katie Mingle out there to see the bulb, which is a genuine

heirloom from the dawn of electric illumination built by one of its pioneers a guy named Adolf Shalay.

Probably when you think about the beginning of electric light you go immediately to Thomas Edison.

That's John Mwellum. He's a writer from San Francisco.

He wrote a piece about the Livermore Light Bulpe for Pop Up magazine earlier this year.

But the age of electric light didn't just switch on all at once. You had tinkers trying to come up with better designs trying to iterate and

innovate something that would burn longer or maybe brighter or that would cost

less. So Shalay was one of these guys. It was a great time of invention and

innovation.

All over America, light bulbs were going off over people's heads,

...