I've heard its thomas edison
Actually he invented the small household light bulb. There were already electric street lamps before him. A big part of it was getting a working filament that wouldn't burn out at thousands of degrees. I'm not sure if the high power street lights even needed filaments; they might have just created arcs. Go look it up.
In 1879, Thomas A. Edison succeeded in making a commercially practicable incandescent lamp. While practicable, it was far from perfect. For further information, see the book Saga of the Vacuum Tube, by Gerald F. J. Tyne, from which the proceeding information was extracted.
