In 1800, while experimenting with a voltaic cell, Humphry Davy produced the first arc light by passing an electric current between two carbon rods, which touched each other, and then drawing them apart.
C are attainable, high enough to melt or vaporize any known substance.
The carbon-arc furnace, which dates from 1845 when it was battery operated, was of no practical value until after the development in 1867 of the electrical dynamo for converting water or steam power into electricity. Not until the work in Spray did the arc furnace become an industrial reality. Over the half century following its discovery in 1836 by Edmund Davy, a cousin of Humphry Davy, acetylene was only a laboratory curiosity. After Thomas L. Willson's discovery of a cheap commercial process for making acetylene in 1892, massive quantities of the gas were in demand for lighting. Portable acetylene generators, which worked simply by dropping water on calcium carbide, provided a practical way for lighting railways, mines, bicycles, and automobiles.