In South Africa, the standard sized Edison Screw fittings are used exclusively on spot-lights and flood-lights as well as some imported free-standing lamps like angle-poises. These latter lamps were obviously the easiest for me to adapt when I moved to the USA. I have no idea when they were first
introduced into South Africa but I would suggest at the beginning of electrical time. I would think that this connection method pre-dates the bayonet cap which is by far the most common light-bulb configuration in South Africa.
Wandering slightly off-topic ...
Two combined lamp and ceiling fans were installed in my new house in South Africa, they were made in China (what isn't!?) and had Edison screw fittings for the lamps. One of the first jobs I did after moving in was to pull an additional wire into the conduit between the unit and the switch box so that, with an additional switch, I could separate the working of the fan and lights. These had been combined by the installer.
My experience with this brings to mind discussions on international wiring standards presently being undertaken on a parallel thread. The unit was 230V (and labeled as such) but had in addition to the green/yellow earth wire had a blue, a black and a white wire. This was very unusual for South Africa and confused me. It had also confused the installation electrician as he had combined the black and blue wires on the fan unit and connected them to the black neutral wire in the ceiling box and the white wire was connected to the red feed coming in from the switch. I have seen red, brown and white wires used as the switched feeds in various places around the country and so at first glance it looked OK but the combined neutral did look very odd.
It was of course wired exactly the wrong way round with the shell of the Edison Screw live when switched on. It was only after having visited the United States that I could see that North American wiring colour conventions had been used on a 230V, Chinese made, South African fan/light fitting. These colours were exactly opposite to our conventions.
A tester soon sorted out the mess and to my (then) surprise white turned out to be the common neutral, black the feed to the fan and blue the feed to the lamps. With North American eyes it now looks perfectly correct. Still at the ime ....
The other fan had been installed exactly the same.
I am surprised that these units got passed the South African Bureau of Standards and were allowed to be imported as coded. The grey
market I assume.