Today, Google commemorates what would have been Thomas Alva Edison's 164th birthday. Visitors to the Google homepage will notice an animated logo that resembles a workshop schematic and features a pulsating lightbulb and moving gears.

It's a fitting tribute to a prolific inventor and innovator like Edison, who is credited with hundreds of patents. Some of his best-known achievements were the phonograph and the motion picture camera, both of which appear in the Google Logo, notes Search Engine Land.

Edison is, perhaps, best known for "inventing" the electric lightbulb, for which he received a patent in 1880. However, that's only partially true. British scientist Joseph Swan is said to have tested the first successful, though rudimentary, carbon filament in 1879. The Guardian explains:

Edison had been working on copies of Swan's bulb, trying to improve its efficiency. He patented an electric light bulb (a copy of Swan's design) in America and began marketing and selling and getting the product into offices and homes. Swan may have invented the light bulb, but Edison can rightly lay claim to making it popular.

View Edison's Google doodle (below), then check out Jules Verne's spectacular, interactive logo from earlier this week.

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