Joseph Swan

Joseph Wilson Swan was born in 1828 at Pallion Hall in Pallion, in the Parish of Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland, County Durham. His parents were John Swan and Isabella Cameron. Swan was apprenticed for six years to a Sunderland firm of pharmacists/druggists, Hudson and Osbaldiston. Swan subsequently joined Mawson's, a firm of manufacturing chemists in Newcastle upon Tyne, started in the year of Swan's birth by John Mawson), formerly located on Grey Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, near Grey's Monument. The premises, now occupied by fashion retailer END., can be identified by a line of Victorian-style electric street lamps in front of the store on Grey Street. Swan lived at Underhill, Low Fell, Gateshead, a large house on Kells Lane North, where he conducted most of his experiments in the large conservatory. The house was later converted into Beaconsfield School, a private fee-paying grant-aided co-educational grammar school. Students there could still find examples of Swan's original electrical fittings. ==Electric light==

s, approx. 30 watts, left side: running with 100 volts) In 1850, Swan began working on a light bulb using carbonised paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. By 1860, he was able to demonstrate a working device, but the lack of a good vacuum, and of an adequate electric source, resulted in an inefficient light bulb with a short life. In August 1863 he presented his own design for a vacuum pump to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The design used mercury falling through a tube to trap air from the system to be evacuated. Swan's design was similar in construction to the Sprengel pump and predates Herman Sprengel's research by two years. Furthermore, it is notable that Sprengel conducted his research while visiting London, and was probably aware of the annual reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Nonetheless, Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison are later reported to have used the Sprengel pump to evacuate their carbon filament lamps. In 1875, Swan returned to consider the problem of the light bulb with the aid of a better vacuum and a carbonised thread as a filament. The most significant feature of Swan's improved lamp was that there was little residual oxygen in the vacuum tube to ignite the filament, thus allowing the filament to glow almost white-hot without catching fire. However, his filament had low resistance, thus needing heavy copper wires to supply it. Swan first publicly demonstrated his incandescent carbon lamp at a lecture for the Newcastle upon Tyne Chemical Society on 18 December 1878. However, after burning with a bright light for some minutes in his laboratory, the lamp broke down owing to excessive current. On 17 January 1879 this lecture was successfully repeated with the lamp shown in actual operation; Swan had solved the problem of incandescent electric lighting by means of a vacuum lamp. On 3 February 1879 he publicly demonstrated a working lamp to an audience of over seven hundred people in the lecture theatre of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, Sir William Armstrong of Cragside presiding. Swan turned his attention to producing a better carbon filament, and the means of attaching its ends. He devised a method of treating cotton to produce "parchmentised thread", and obtained British Patent 4933 on 27 November 1880. From that time he began installing light bulbs in homes and landmarks in England. The Lit & Phil Library in Westgate Road, Newcastle, was the first public room lit by electric light during a lecture by Swan on 20 October 1880. In 1881 he founded his own company, The Swan Electric Light Company, and started commercial production. in London noting it as the first public building to be lit entirely by electricity in 1881 The Savoy, a state-of-the-art theatre in the City of Westminster, London, was the first public building in the world lit entirely by electricity. Swan supplied about 1,200 incandescent lamps, powered by an generator on open land near the theatre. The builder of the Savoy, Richard D'Oyly Carte, explained why he had introduced Swan's electric light: "The greatest drawbacks to the enjoyment of the theatrical performances are, undoubtedly, the foul air and heat which pervade all theatres. As everyone knows, each gas-burner consumes as much oxygen as many people, and causes great heat beside. The incandescent lamps consume no oxygen, and cause no perceptible heat." The first generator proved too small to power the whole building, and though the entire front-of-house was electrically lit, the stage was lit by gas until 28 December 1881. At that performance, Carte stepped on stage and broke a glowing lightbulb before the audience to demonstrate the safety of Swan's new technology. On 29 December 1881, The Times described the electric lighting as visually superior to gaslight. The first private residence, other than the inventor's, lit by the new incandescent lamp was that of his friend, Sir William Armstrong at Cragside, near Rothbury, Northumberland. Swan personally supervised the installation there in December 1880. Swan had formed "The Swan Electric Light Company Ltd" with a factory at Benwell, Newcastle, and had established the first commercial manufacture of incandescent lightbulbs by the beginning of 1881. Swan's carbon rod lamp and carbon filament lamp, while functional, were still relatively impractical owing to low resistance (needing very expensive thick copper wiring) and short running life. While searching for a better filament for his light bulb, Swan inadvertently made another advance. In 1881, he developed and patented a process for squeezing nitrocellulose through holes to form conducting fibres. His newly established company (which by merger eventually became the Edison and Swan United Company) used Swan's cellulose filaments in their bulbs. The textile industry has also used this process. The first ship to use Swan's invention was The City of Richmond, owned by the Inman Line. She was fitted with incandescent lamps in June 1881. The Royal Navy also introduced them to its ships soon after; with HMS Inflexible having the new lamps installed in the same year. Swan was one of the early developers of the electric safety lamp for miners, exhibiting his first in Newcastle upon Tyne at the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers on 14 May 1881. This required a wired supply, so the following year, he presented one with a battery and other improved versions followed. By 1886, a lamp with better light output than a flame safety lamp was in production by the Edison-Swan Company. However, it suffered from problems of reliability and was not a success. It took development by others over the next 20 years or so before effective electric lamps were in common use. ==Conjunction with Edison==

In what are considered to be independent lines of inquiry, Swan's incandescent electric lamp was developed at the same time that Thomas Edison was working on his incandescent lamp, with Swan's first successful lamp and Edison's lamp both patented in 1880. Edison's goal in developing his lamp was for it to be used as one part of a much larger system: a long-life high-resistance lamp that could be connected in parallel to work economically with the large-scale electric-lighting utility he was creating. In 1886, Ediswan moved production to a former jute mill at Ponders End, North London. In 1916, Ediswan set up the UK's first radio thermionic valve factory at Ponders End. This area, with nearby Brimsdown subsequently developed as a centre for the manufacture of thermionic valves, cathode-ray tubes, etc., and nearby parts of Enfield became an important centre of the electronics industry for much of the 20th century. Ediswan became part of British Thomson-Houston and Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) in the late 1920s. ==Photography==

When working with wet photographic plates, Swan noticed that heat increased the sensitivity of the silver bromide emulsion. By 1871, he had devised a method of using dry plates, and substituting nitrocellulose plastic for glass plates, thus initiating the age of convenience in photography. Eight years later, he patented bromide paper, developments of which are still used for black-and-white photographic prints. He subsequently sold his patents to the Autotype Company of London in 1868. ==Honours==

, on the former Electricity Board building In 1904, Swan was knighted, awarded the Royal Society's Hughes Medal, and made an honorary member of the Pharmaceutical Society. He had received the highest decoration in France, the Legion of Honour, in recognition for his invention of the electric light bulb after showing it in an exhibition in Paris in 1881. In 1906, he received the Albert medal of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1894, Swan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), and in 1898 he was elected president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers; at the time, Swan was one of its three honorary members, the other two being Lord Kelvin and Henry Wilde. He also served as president of the Society of Chemical Industry from 1900-1901, and in 1903 he was chosen first president of the Faraday Society. ==Personal life==

Swan married firstly Frances "Fanny" White, third daughter of William White, of Liverpool, at Camberwell Chapel, London, on 31 July 1862. They had three surviving children: Cameron, Mary Edmonds, and Joseph Henry. Frances died on 9 January 1868 and he married secondly Hannah White, the younger sister of Frances, at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on 3 October 1871. They had five children: Hilda, Frances Isobel, Kenneth Rayden, Percival, and Dorothy. Sir Kenneth Rayden Swan was a QC and an acknowledged authority on patent law. Frances Isobel was the mother of Christopher Morcom, a friend of Alan Turing at Sherborne School. After her son's death from complications of bovine tuberculosis in 1930, she and Turing began exchanging letters. Swan died in 1914 at his home in Overhill, Warlingham, Surrey. Mourners included representatives of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the Royal Society. ==References==