29 Facts About Joseph Swan

Sir Joseph Wilson Swan FRS was an English physicist, chemist, and inventor.

Joseph Swan is known as an independent early developer of a successful incandescent light bulb, and is the person responsible for developing and supplying the first incandescent lights used to illuminate homes and public buildings, including the Savoy Theatre, London, in 1881.

In 1904, Swan was knighted by King Edward VII, awarded the Royal Society's Hughes Medal, and was made an honorary member of the Pharmaceutical Society.

Joseph Swan had received the highest decoration in France, the Legion of Honour, when he visited the 1881 International Exposition of Electricity, Paris.

Joseph Wilson Swan was born in 1828 at Pallion Hall in Pallion, in the Parish of Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland, County Durham.

However, it is not known whether Joseph Swan completed his six-year apprenticeship, as both partners subsequently died.

Joseph Swan was said to have had an enquiring mind, even as a child.

Joseph Swan augmented his education with a fascination for his surroundings, the industry of the area, and reading at Sunderland Library.

Joseph 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.

In 1850, Joseph Swan began working on a light bulb using carbonised paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb.

Joseph Swan's design was similar in construction to the Sprengel pump and predates Herman Sprengel's research by two years.

In 1875, Joseph 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 Joseph 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.

On 17 January 1879 this lecture was successfully repeated with the lamp shown in actual operation; Joseph Swan had solved the problem of incandescent electric lighting by means of a vacuum lamp.

Joseph Swan turned his attention to producing a better carbon filament, and the means of attaching its ends.

Joseph Swan devised a method of treating cotton to produce "parchmentised thread", and obtained British Patent 4933 on 27 November 1880.

Joseph Swan supplied about 1,200 incandescent lamps, powered by an 88.3-kilowatt generator on open land near the theatre.

Joseph Swan had formed "The Joseph 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.

Joseph Swan's newly established company used Swan's cellulose filaments in their bulbs.

The first ship to use Joseph Swan's invention was The City of Richmond, owned by the Inman Line.

Joseph Swan was fitted with incandescent lamps in June 1881.

Joseph 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.

When working with wet photographic plates, Joseph Swan noticed that heat increased the sensitivity of the silver bromide emulsion.

In 1864, Joseph Swan patented the transfer process for making carbon prints, a permanent photographic process.

In 1894, Joseph Swan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1898 he was elected president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers; at the time, Joseph Swan was one of its three honorary members, the other two being Lord Kelvin and Henry Wilde.

Joseph Swan served as president of the Society of Chemical Industry in 1901, and in 1903 he was chosen first president of the Faraday Society.

Joseph Swan married firstly Frances "Fanny" White, third daughter of William White, of Liverpool, at Camberwell Chapel, London, on 31 July 1862.

Sir Kenneth Rayden Joseph Swan was a QC and an acknowledged authority on patent law.

Joseph Swan died in 1914 at his home in Overhill, Warlingham, Surrey.