Bringing light to the world
Joseph Swan
A physicist and chemist, Joseph Swan was born in Sunderland in 1828 and served an apprenticeship with a pharmacist here. He became a partner in a manufacturing chemists in Newcastle and it was from the companies premises in Mosley Street in 1860 that Swan produced his first electric light bulb.
However due to the lack of a good vacuum and an adequate electric source the bulb had a short lifetime and produced insufficient light. It was Charles Stearn??s development of new equipment for producing a vacuum in a glass bulb in the 1870s that enabled Swan to develop what we now know as the light bulb.
The carbon filament lamp was demonstrated first at the Chemical Society in 1878 and then exhibited to an audience of 700 in a lecture theatre on Newcastle on 3rd Feb 1879 where it burned for 40 hours. Thomas Edison did not exhibit his carbon filament lamp until the October of the same year. After this demonstration Swan established the first electric light bulb factory in Benwell, Newcastle, and Mosely Street became the first street in the world to be lit by electric light.
Swan was also interested in photography and he developed the rapid photographic plate and in 1879 patented bromide paper which is still used today in photographic prints. For his pioneering work Swan was knighted in 1904.
Submitted by: Sarah McLeod, 22 July 2004
