It is all part of the quest of John Goscha, who already has one successful start-up company under his belt, to build a better light bulb. Mr. Goscha, 30, started a custom golf-club business in high school and founded IdeaPaint, which allows most surfaces to function as dry-erase boards, as an undergraduate at Babson College.

Image The Finally bulb will be $8, competitive with some of the cheapest LEDs on the market. Credit... Rick Friedman for The New York Times

But IdeaPaint grew up, he said, and about three years ago he was eager to do something new.

“I took a couple of months and just tried to kind of open my blinders and say, ‘Hey what’s going on in the world,' ” he said. Around that time, a friend mentioned the incandescent phaseout, of which he had been unaware. Unhappy as a consumer with compact fluorescents and LEDs, he said, he decided to pursue making an alternative. “I thought, ‘I don’t really want those and there have got to be other people who don’t want those either,’ ” he said.

Looking for the solution, he began attending conferences and meetings and enlisted the advice of Victor Roberts, a former General Electric engineer who eventually joined the venture. On a flight to Hong Kong, the two talked about induction, a technology that has many applications, including electric motors in home appliances and construction cranes because it is long-lasting. But it had not yet been widely adapted for home use in lighting because it was difficult and expensive to fit the electronics needed for bright, omnidirectional light inside a regular bulb.

With the advent of smaller transistors and other advances, though, the company, which has hired engineers from established light makers like Osram Sylvania and Philips, shrank the apparatus to a three-inch antenna wrapped in copper wire. That creates a magnetic field inside the bulb that prods mercury to produce ultraviolet light, which in turn creates visible light when it interacts with a special phosphor coating the glass.

The result, to be manufactured in India, has almost all of its regulatory approvals. It can be disposed of in landfills despite its mercury content because the amount of metal is minuscule and in solid, not liquid, form. It also has received approval from the Federal Communications Commission because the antenna is technically a radio receiver, albeit a weak one. Mr. Goscha plans to sell the bulb for $8, making it competitive with some of the cheapest LEDs on the market.

But although it has shown enough promise to have attracted about $19 million from investors, including some of Mr. Goscha’s Babson professors and interest from big-box retailers, its path is not yet cleared.