Menlo Park, New Jersey. A decisive experiment for the light bulb filament: some Japanese bamboo samples (among the thousands tested) lasted nearly 3.5 hours at the dazzling glow of 71 candela. Another version, dimmed to the more sustainable brightness of 16 candela, lasted a remarkable 1,589 hours. From this day forward, the words bamboo and filament became synonymous in Menlo Park.
