Who got electricity first Canada or U.S.A??

Question

I need to know because I am out smarting a noob on facebook..

Answer 1

Patent no. 3738. Filing year 1874.

"Electric Light," Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans.

It is commonly believed that the great American inventor Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, which he patented in the United States in 1879. Edison's bulb, however, was predated by several electric light prototypes, one of which was patented in 1874 by two Canadians.

Henry Woodward was a medical student in Toronto when he and Mathew Evans (a hotel keeper described in the patent only as "gentleman") devised their electric lamp. It consisted of a pure carbon rod attached to electrodes and placed in a glass tube. Woodward and Evans pumped out the air in the tube and replaced it with a "rarified gas that [would] not unite chemically with the carbon when hot." (This gas was nitrogen.) The carbon glowed when an electric current passed through it

Unfortunately, Woodward and Evans were unable to interest investors in their idea. In 1876, Woodward applied for a patent in the United States. Edison saw the concept's potential and in 1879 bought the patent rights from Woodward. Later, he also bought a share of the original Canadian patent. Over the next few years, Edison developed the incandescent light bulb, first using a carbon filament and then switching to bamboo.

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:WQ-...

In North America, parallel developments were also taking place. On July 24, 1874 a Canadian patent was filed for the Woodward and Evans Light by a Toronto medical electrician named Henry Woodward and a colleague Mathew Evans. They built their lamps with different sizes and shapes of carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. Woodward and Evans attempted to commercialize their lamp, but were unsuccessful. They ended up selling their patent (U.S. Patent 0,181,613 ) to Thomas Edison in 1879 [

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescen...

Answer 2

It was the US.

Thomas Edison, together with Joseph Swan he formed a company that made the first filament light.  Before they came up with that, light was created by causing an electrical arc.  It worked but it wasn't super reliable.

The generator was used in the lab to create electricity and light the lab, and when testing was done, they took the application one step further in 1882 to light up the first street....in New York City.