Sir Joseph Wilson Swan FRS (31 October 1828 – 27 May 1914) was an English scientist and inventor. He helped create a working incandescent light bulb and was the first to use incandescent lights to light up homes and public buildings, such as the Savoy Theatre in London, in 1881.
In 1904, Swan was given a knighthood by King Edward VII. He also received the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society and became an honorary member of the Pharmaceutical Society. During his visit to the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris, he was honored with France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour. His inventions were displayed at the exhibition, and the city used his electric lighting system.
Early life
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 began an apprenticeship with a Sunderland pharmacy company, Hudson and Osbaldiston, for six years. However, it is unknown if he finished his apprenticeship because both partners of the company later died. Swan was known to be curious and interested in learning, even as a child. He expanded his knowledge by exploring his surroundings, studying the local industries, and reading at the Sunderland Library. He also attended lectures at the Sunderland Atheneum.
Later, Swan joined Mawson's, a chemical manufacturing company in Newcastle upon Tyne. The company was founded in 1828 by John Mawson, who was married to Swan’s sister, Elizabeth Swan. In 1846, Swan was offered a partnership in the company. The business later became known as Mawson, Swan, and Morgan and operated until 1973. The store closed in 1986 and was previously located on Grey Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, near Grey's Monument. Today, the building is occupied by a fashion retailer called END. and can be recognized by a row of Victorian-style electric street lamps outside.
Swan lived in a large house called Underhill on Kells Lane North in Low Fell, Gateshead. He conducted most of his experiments in the house’s large conservatory. The house was later turned into Beaconsfield School, a private grammar school. Students at the school can still see examples of Swan’s original electrical fittings in the building.
Electric light
In 1850, Swan began working on a light bulb using carbon paper threads inside a glass bulb with no air. By 1860, he showed a working device, but the poor vacuum and weak electric power made the bulb inefficient and short-lived. In August 1863, Swan shared his design for a vacuum pump with the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His pump used mercury flowing through a tube to remove air. Swan’s pump was similar to the Sprengel pump, but he created it two years before Sprengel’s research. Sprengel was in London and likely saw reports from the British Association. Later, Swan and Thomas Edison used the Sprengel pump for their light bulbs.
In 1875, Swan returned to improve the light bulb with a better vacuum and a carbon thread as the filament. His new lamp had little leftover oxygen in the glass, so the filament could glow nearly white-hot without burning. However, the filament had low resistance, requiring thick copper wires to power it.
Swan first showed his incandescent carbon lamp at a lecture on 18 December 1878. The lamp worked for a few minutes but broke due to too much current. On 17 January 1879, he repeated the demonstration successfully. On 3 February 1879, Swan demonstrated the lamp to over 700 people in Newcastle. He later developed a method to treat cotton into "parchmentised thread" and received a patent in 1880. He began installing light bulbs in homes and landmarks in England.
Swan’s home, Underhill in Gateshead, was the first house with electric lights. The Lit & Phil Library in Newcastle was the first public room lit by electric light during a lecture on 20 October 1880. In 1881, Swan founded The Swan Electric Light Company to produce light bulbs commercially.
The Savoy, a theatre in London, was the first public building fully lit by electricity. Swan provided about 1,200 lamps powered by a generator near the theatre. The theatre’s builder, Richard D'Oyly Carte, said electric lights improved performances by reducing heat and air pollution. At first, the generator was too small to power the entire building, so the stage used gas until December 1881. Carte demonstrated the safety of Swan’s lamps by breaking a bulb on stage. The Times praised the electric lighting as better than gaslight.
The first private home, other than Swan’s, with electric lights was Sir William Armstrong’s house at Cragside. Swan supervised the installation there in 1880. His company, The Swan Electric Light Company Ltd, began making light bulbs in 1881.
Swan’s early bulbs had issues because the filaments needed expensive thick wires and had short lifespans. In 1881, he developed a method to press nitrocellulose into fibers, which his company used in bulbs. The textile industry also used this process.
The first ship with Swan’s lights was The City of Richmond in 1881. The Royal Navy later used the lights on ships like HMS Inflexible. Swan’s lights were also used in the Severn Tunnel project.
Swan helped create the first electric safety lamp for miners, shown in 1881. Early versions needed wires, but later models used batteries. By 1886, the Edison-Swan Company made a lamp brighter than gas lamps, but it was unreliable. It took more than 20 years for effective electric lamps to become widely used.
Conjunction with Edison
Swan's incandescent electric lamp was developed at the same time that Thomas Edison was working on his own incandescent lamp. Both Swan's first successful lamp and Edison's lamp were patented in 1880. Edison aimed to create a long-lasting, high-resistance lamp that could be connected in parallel to work efficiently with the large-scale electric-lighting system he was building. Swan's original lamp had low resistance and a short lifespan, making it unsuitable for this purpose. Because Swan held strong patents in Great Britain, the two companies merged in 1883 to combine their inventions. This led to the creation of the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, known as "Ediswan." The company sold lamps with cellulose filaments, which Swan invented in 1881, while Edison's company continued using bamboo filaments outside of Britain. In 1892, General Electric (GE) began using Swan's patents to produce cellulose filaments, which were later replaced in 1904 by GE's "General Electric Metallized" (GEM) baked cellulose filaments.
In 1886, Ediswan moved its production to a former jute mill in Ponders End, North London. In 1916, Ediswan established the UK's first radio thermionic valve factory in the same area. Over time, Ponders End and nearby Brimsdown became a center for manufacturing thermionic valves, cathode-ray tubes, and other electronic components. Parts of Enfield also became an important hub for the electronics industry throughout much of the 20th century. By the late 1920s, Ediswan became part of British Thomson-Houston and Associated Electrical Industries (AEI).
Photography
When working with wet photographic plates, Swan found that heat made the silver bromide emulsion more sensitive. In 1871, he created a method to use dry plates and replaced glass plates with nitrocellulose plastic, starting the era of easier photography. Eight years later, he patented bromide paper, a technique still used today for black-and-white prints.
In 1864, Swan introduced carbon tissue and patented a process to make carbon prints permanent. By adding a transfer step, he could create photographs with a full range of tones. In 1868, he sold his patents to the Autotype Company in London.
Honours
In 1904, Swan was given a title of honor, received the Royal Society's Hughes Medal, and became an honorary member of the Pharmaceutical Society. He had been awarded the Legion of Honour, which is the highest decoration in France, for inventing the electric light bulb. This recognition came after he displayed the invention at an exhibition in Paris in 1881. In 1906, he was given the Albert Medal by the Royal Society of Arts.
In 1894, Swan was elected as a member of the Royal Society (FRS). In 1898, he became president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. At that time, Swan was one of three honorary members of the organization, along with Lord Kelvin and Henry Wilde. In 1901, he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) from Durham University. He also served as president of the Society of Chemical Industry from 1900 to 1901. In 1903, he was chosen as the first president of the Faraday Society.
In 1945, the London Power Company honored Swan by naming a new ship, the SS Sir Joseph Swan, after him. The ship was a coastal collier with a gross register tonnage of 1,554.
Personal life
Swan married Frances "Fanny" White, the third daughter of William White from Liverpool, at Camberwell Chapel in London on July 31, 1862. They had three children who lived to adulthood: Cameron, Mary Edmonds, and Joseph Henry. Frances died on January 9, 1868. Swan then married Hannah White, Frances's younger sister, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on October 3, 1871. They had five children: Hilda, Frances Isobel, Kenneth Rayden, Percival, and Dorothy. Sir Kenneth Rayden Swan was a Queen's Counsel and a well-known expert on patent law. Frances Isobel was the mother of Christopher Morcom, who was a close friend of Alan Turing at Sherborne School. After her son died from complications of bovine tuberculosis in 1930, she and Turing began writing letters to each other. Swan died in 1914 at his home in Overhill, Warlingham, Surrey. His funeral took place at All Saints' Church in Warlingham on May 30, 1914, and he was buried in the churchyard. People who came to the funeral included members of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the Royal Society.