Joseph Swan

Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (October 31, 1828 - May 27, 1914) was a physicist and chemist born in Sunderland, England

However he is most famous for the development of the light bulb. In 1850 the British pioneer began working with carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. By 1860 he was able to demonstrate a working device, and obtained a UK patent covering a partial vacuum, carbon filament incandescent lamp but lack of an adequate supply of electricity resulted in a short lifetime for the bulb and inefficient light. By the mid-1870s better pumps became available, and Swan returned to his experiments.

Swan received a British patent for his device in 1878, about a year before Edison. Swan had reported success to the Newcastle Chemical Society and at a lecture in Newcastle in February 1879 he demonstrated a working lamp that utilized a carbon fibre filament. The most significant feature of Swan's 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. From this year he began installing light bulbs in homes and landmarks in England and by 1881 he had started his own company, and The Swan Electric Light Company was producing the first commercial lamps. Later Swan teamed up with Edison for the commercial exploitation, using the trade mark "Edi-Swan".

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English physicist and electrician. Joseph Wilson Swan was born on Oct. 31, 1828, in Sunderland, and he served an apprenticeship with a pharmacist there. He later became a partner in Mawson's, a firm of manufacturing chemists in Newcastle. This company existed as Mawson Swan and Morgan until recently. He worked at the company premises at 13 Mosley Street. In 1860 Swan developed a primitive electric light bulb that used a filament of carbonised paper in an evacuated glass bulb. However, the lack of good vacuum and an adequate electric source resulted in a short lifetime for the bulb and an inefficient light. Swan's original light bulb design was substantially that used by Thomas Alva Edison in America nearly 20 years later. Fifteen years later, in 1875, Swan returned to consider the problem of the light bulb and, with the aid of a better vacuum and a carbonized thread as a filament (the same material Edison eventually decided upon), he successfully demonstrated a true incandescent bulb in 1878 a year earlier than Edison.

When working with wet photographic plates, he noticed that heat increased the sensitivity of the silver bromide emulsion. By 1871 he had devised a method of drying the wet plates, initiating the age of convenience in photography. Eight years later he patented bromide paper, the paper commonly used in modern photographic prints.

In 1880, Swan gave the world's first large-scale public exhibition of electric lamps at Newcastle, England. Three years later, while searching for a better carbon filament for his light bulb, Swan patented a process for squeezing nitro-cellulose through holes to form fibres. The textile industry has used his process. Swan was knighted in 1904. He died on May 27, 1914, in Warlingham, Surrey.