The Finally Light Bulb Company is a company of many fathers. The first one is John Goscha, a serial entrepreneur and Babson College graduate who founded the company in 2012. The current one is Michael Simon, a former Panera Bread executive who replaced Goscha as new CEO two weeks ago.
However, the company owes its very existence to Nikola Tesla, whose portrait hangs on the door of one of the company’s two conference rooms (the other one is dedicated to another genial mind of the 20th century, Tesla’s longtime rival Thomas Edison).
Let’s take a step back to the moment Goscha decided to reinvent one of the things that hasn't seen much innovation in the last 50 to 100 years, at least in their exterior appearance: light bulbs. The new light bulb, according to Goscha, had to be energy efficient, look like an average light bulb and last long. What had to be different and better, according to Goscha, was the quality of light.
To accomplish this goal, the company brought to market one of Tesla’s inventions - the Tesla coil - and used it to create a new type of light bulb. The Finally Light signature bulb has a core made of copper instead of tungsten. The copper coil, where electricity runs really fast, creates a magnetic field that ionizes the gas mix inside the bulb. The resulting light is almost creamy and way better than the light produced by LED bulbs - The kind of light that makes almost everybody look sick and pale in elevators.
Although Tesla was able to invent the copper coil by himself, bringing it to market as part of the light bulb required different expertises, including thermal and mechanical engineers, plasma physicists, chemists and glass blowers.
“I never thought that building a light bulb would take so many scientists,” Goscha said.
So far, the company has 30 employees, 25 of them based in the Boston office and 5 in Shangai, China. The Boston office is located near Sullivan station, in the same building as Piaggio Fast Forward. Perhaps not coincidentally, Finally Light Bulbs Company’s space is a hybrid as well: between an office and an engineering lab.
Here are some of the photos that I took during my tour of The Finally Light Bulb Company.
