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The article says it's a carbon filament bulb. Modern incandescent bulbs use a tungsten filament.

Carbon filament bulbs are still sold for decorative lighting:

https://www.amazon.com/carbon-filament-bulb/s?k=carbon+filam...

Kind of related: an interesting video on how tungsten filaments are made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo

To be sort of fair, Mr Edison was an engineer, and it was back in a time when there was more 'empirical' methods rather than predictive theories of why such and such happened. So, when there's an emphasis on building things, knowing all of this can be helpful. There's also a business type question in there, perhaps to keep an engineer's awareness of business needs in mind.

For example, as Engineering Guy Bill explains, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGqBb3iZPo, the method for discovering light bulb filaments was very much a search problem, so knowing as much seemingly distant facts about barrel wood, cork, optical facets might actually be important.

Questions about Cleopatra and so forth may have been to see how educated an applicant was. I wonder if those helped or hurt a candidate. I.e., did this person learn this on their own through curiosity or did they pick it up at school...

Disclaimer: I am not qualified to give opinions on any topic.