Sir Joseph Wilson Swan FRS (31 October 1828 – 27 May 1914) was an English physicist, chemist, and inventor. He was one of the first people to create a working incandescent light bulb. He also developed the first use of incandescent lights to light homes and public buildings, such as the Savoy Theatre in London, in 1881.

In 1904, Swan was knighted by King Edward VII. He also received the Royal Society's Hughes Medal and was given the title of honorary member of the Pharmaceutical Society. During his visit to the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity in Paris, he was awarded France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honour. The exhibition displayed his inventions, and the city of Paris 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 business called Hudson and Osbaldiston, which was a firm of pharmacists and druggists. The apprenticeship lasted six years, but it is not known if Swan completed it, as both partners of the firm later died. Swan was known to be curious and interested in learning even as a child. He expanded his knowledge by studying the area around him, reading about local industries, and visiting the Sunderland Library. He also attended lectures at the Sunderland Atheneum.

Later, Swan joined Mawson's, a manufacturing chemists firm in Newcastle upon Tyne. The firm was started 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 located on Grey Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, near Grey's Monument. The building is now occupied by a fashion retailer called END. and can be recognized by a row of Victorian-style electric street lamps outside the store.

Swan lived in a large house called Underhill on Kells Lane North in Low Fell, Gateshead. He conducted many 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 some of Swan’s original electrical fittings in the building.

Electric light

In 1850, Joseph Swan started working on a light bulb using thin threads made from carbonized paper inside a glass bulb with air removed. By 1860, he showed a working version of the bulb, but it did not last long because the vacuum inside the bulb was not strong enough, and the power source was not good enough. In August 1863, Swan shared his design for a vacuum pump at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His pump used mercury flowing through a tube to remove air from the system. Swan’s design was similar to a pump created later by Herman Sprengel, but Swan’s work happened two years earlier. Sprengel was in London during his research and may have read reports from the British Association. Later, both Swan and Thomas Edison used Sprengel’s pump to make their light bulbs.

In 1875, Swan returned to the problem of making a better light bulb. He used a stronger vacuum and a carbonized thread as the filament. The most important improvement was that the vacuum had very little oxygen left, which prevented the filament from burning. This allowed the filament to glow very hot without catching fire. However, the filament had low resistance, so it needed thick copper wires to carry the electricity.

Swan first showed his improved light bulb at a lecture for the Newcastle upon Tyne Chemical Society on December 18, 1878. The bulb worked for a few minutes but then broke because too much electricity passed through it. On January 17, 1879, he repeated the demonstration successfully. Swan had solved the problem of making electric lights work safely using a vacuum. On February 3, 1879, he demonstrated the working bulb to more than 700 people at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle, with Sir William Armstrong presiding. Swan then focused on improving the carbon filament and found a way to treat cotton to make "parchmentized thread." He received a British patent for this method on November 27, 1880. From that time, he began installing light bulbs in homes and famous places in England.

Swan’s home, Underhill in Gateshead, was the first private house with working light bulbs. The Lit & Phil Library in Newcastle was the first public room lit by electric light during a lecture on October 20, 1880. In 1881, Swan started his own company, The Swan Electric Light Company, to produce light bulbs commercially.

The Savoy, a modern theatre in London, was the first public building in the world fully lit by electricity. Swan provided about 1,200 incandescent lamps powered by a generator near the theatre. The theatre’s builder, Richard D'Oyly Carte, explained that electric lights were better than gas lights because they did not use oxygen or create heat. The first generator was too small to light the entire building, so the stage remained lit by gas until December 28, 1881. At that performance, Carte broke a glowing light bulb on stage to show how safe Swan’s technology was. On December 29, 1881, The Times wrote that electric lighting looked better than gaslight.

The first private home, other than Swan’s, to use electric light was Sir William Armstrong’s house, Cragside, in Northumberland. Swan supervised the installation there in December 1880. Swan had started a company, The Swan Electric Light Company Ltd, with a factory in Newcastle, and by early 1881, he was making light bulbs for sale.

Swan’s early light bulbs worked but had problems. The filaments had low resistance, which required expensive thick copper wires, and the bulbs did not last long. While looking for better filaments, Swan discovered a new method in 1881. He developed a process to squeeze nitrocellulose through holes to make conductive fibers. His company used these fibers in their bulbs, and the textile industry also used the process.

The first ship to use Swan’s light bulbs was The City of Richmond, owned by the Inman Line, which had incandescent lamps in June 1881. The Royal Navy also began using electric lights on its ships soon after, including HMS Inflexible in the same year. Swan’s lights were also used in engineering projects, such as the Severn Tunnel, where 20-candlepower lamps were installed in temporary tunnels.

Swan was one of the first to develop an electric safety lamp for miners. He showed his first version in Newcastle in May 1881. This lamp needed a power supply, so the next year, he created a version with a battery. By 1886, the Edison-Swan Company made a lamp that produced more light than traditional gas lamps, but it had reliability issues and was not widely used. It took more than 20 years of improvements by others before electric lamps became common.

Conjunction with Edison

Swan developed his incandescent electric lamp around the same time 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 used in parallel within a large electric-lighting system he was designing. 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, his company and Edison’s company merged in 1883 to combine their inventions. The new company, called Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, was commonly known as "Ediswan." The company produced lamps with cellulose filaments, which Swan had invented in 1881, while Edison’s company continued using bamboo filaments outside Britain. In 1892, General Electric (GE) began using Swan’s patents to make cellulose filaments, but by 1904, GE replaced them with its own "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 Ponders End. This area, along with 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. In 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. By 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, which is still used today for black-and-white photographic prints.

In 1864, Swan introduced carbon tissue and patented a transfer process to make carbon prints a permanent photographic method. By adding the transfer step, Swan could produce photographs with a full range of tones. In 1868, he sold his patents to the Autotype Company of London.

Honours

In 1904, Swan was knighted, received the Royal Society's Hughes Medal, and became an honorary member of the Pharmaceutical Society. He had previously been honored with France's highest award, the Legion of Honour, for inventing the electric light bulb. This recognition followed his display of the invention at an exhibition in Paris in 1881. In 1906, he was awarded the Albert Medal by the Royal Society of Arts.

In 1894, Swan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In 1898, he became president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, a position he held while serving as one of its three honorary members, along with Lord Kelvin and Henry Wilde. In 1901, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) from Durham University. He also led the Society of Chemical Industry from 1900 to 1901 and was elected the first president of the Faraday Society in 1903.

In 1945, the London Power Company honored Swan by naming a new 1,554 GRT coastal collier SS Sir Joseph Swan.

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 later 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 on May 30, 1914, at All Saints' Church in Warlingham, and he was buried in the churchyard. People who attended included representatives from the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and the Royal Society.