The book shown to the left (The Goebel Legend - The Struggle for the Invention of the Incandescent Lamp) is a critique of the alleged achievements in the field of the incandescent lamp, of one Heinrich Göbel (Henry Goebel), whose name almost totally occupied certain technical periodicals during the year 1893. This new writing, which will become available in February 2007 in the German language, was written by Dr. Hans-Christian Rohde, a resident of Springe, Germany. The publisher of the book is zu Klampen. The town of Springe is also the birthplace of Henry Goebel (1818-1893) and it was from there that he emigrated to the United States in 1849.

Dr. Rohde spent several years researching this subject and he accumulated difficult-to-locate materials from the United States as well as Germany. In this monumental work Rohde concludes that Henry Goebel has been given undue credit for the invention . It is widely believed today that the honor of the development of a practical incandescent lamp rightly belongs to Thomas A. Edison.

The following is the abstract for the book:

"In Germany, Heinrich Göbel, born in 1818 in the town of Springe near Hanover, is seen as the first inventor of an electric incandescent light fit for practical use. It is said that Göbel, a German immigrant to New York City, constructed a carbon filament lamp - similar to the one described in Thomas A. Edison's famous patent of 1880 - as early as 1854. But allegedly the work of Heinrich Göbel (or Henry Goebel, as he called himself in America) had been overlooked by commerce and science. According to German encyclopedias, it was just a few months before his death in 1893 that a court of appeals recognized the priority of Göbel's invention. This story is being reviewed and examined here. It can be shown that the wide spread German notion of the origins of the incandescent lamp is wrong. No court ever accepted Goebel's allegation. A thorough review of all affidavits in related suits available for inspection in U. S. archives confirms that Goebel's story is not tenable; it was fraudulent. In 1882, Goebel had already used his pretension for reasons of advertisement for his own business. In 1893, three companies that were producing incandescent lamps without license tried to use Goebel's story to defend preliminary injunctions brought against them by the Edison Electric Light Company. In one case, a judge refused the preliminary injunction asked for, but this fact does not prove the truth of Goebel's story. In Germany, however, reports on those suits in American technical papers were misunderstood, and in the 1920s the legend arose that Heinrich Göbel, a man of true German spirit and blood, was the real inventor of the incandescent lamp. The story was particularly popular during the years of the Nazi regime, but it was retold and believed up to the beginning of the 21st century."

The book image shown above was downloaded from the zu Klampen site given above.