Joseph Wilson Swan

English inventor

• Born: October 31, 1828
• Birthplace: Sunderland, Durham, England
• Died: May 27, 1914
• Place of death: Warlingham, Surrey, England

Swan’s invention and business leadership helped launch the electric lighting industry. He pioneered in artificial fibers. His technical contributions enriched a wide range of other fields, from photography to batteries to tanning.

Early Life

Joseph Wilson Swan was the son of John and Isabella Cameron Swan, who were both descended from Scottish families that had settled in England during the middle of the eighteenth century. His father built up a comfortable business selling iron fittings for ships, such as anchors and chains. He was, however, easygoing, generous, and unbusinesslike and lost much of his wealth by backing his own unsuccessful ventures and inventions.

While the family money lasted, Joseph was educated at a dame school and a local boarding school, but his real education came from everyday life in the bustling Tyneside region of England, then one of the world’s leading centers for the iron industry, shipbuilding, the mining and use of coal, and a wide range of supporting industries. Highlights of this education included some excursions to an uncle’s rope works and a demonstration by a family friend of a static-electricity machine.

Departure from school at the age of fourteen served to further Swan’s education. He was apprenticed to two Sunderland druggists, both of whom died before three years of his six-year term were up. He then moved on to work as a full-fledged chemist for a friend, John Mawson, a chemist and druggist, first in Sunderland and later in Newcastle. While working with Mawson, Swan found enough spare time to experiment, improvising equipment using the flasks and bottles in the pharmacy. He made coils and condensers and tried out simple electrical experiments. “He was a great enthusiast,” a coworker recalled:

It was only after the day’s work was over that he was able to experiment, for he had no proper laboratory.… His experiments were always carried out not only with skill and forethought, but with the least possible risk of failure.

Life’s Work

This low-risk, incremental approach to invention characterized Swan’s life’s work. He later concluded that his particular strength as an inventor was not in conceiving wholly new things but in “looking at anything being done in the nature of a handicraft or process and finding a better way of doing it.” At the age of seventeen, he began to apply this strength to the electric light, an invention already more than thirty years old but not yet in practical use. By 1848, he had developed his own version of one of the principal types already proposed, an incandescent carbon conductor glowing in a glass-enclosed vacuum. Swan’s main improvement was to use a strip of carbonized paper in place of a graphite rod for the conductor. Electricity, however, was too expensive to make the lamp economical, and the vacuum he could produce was not good enough to give it a long life, so he turned to other areas.

Swan’s employer, Mawson, a prosperous businessperson, devout Methodist, and public servant, ushered Swan into Newcastle’s inner circle of religious dissenters and political liberals. Swan also became a leader of the local literary and philosophical society. His associations thus brought Swan local business, public, and scientific backing as he emerged as an inventor.

The first photograph he saw, in a Sunderland shop window in about 1850, launched him on a series of photography inventions. By 1856, he had improved the formula for making collodion, a key ingredient in photographic plates, and Mawson built a factory to manufacture it. By 1864, Swan had improved the process of photographic printing, taken up the manufacture of specialty chemicals, and earned one of the world’s first patents on the process of chrome tanning.

Swan’s chemical inventions won for him prizes at the Paris Exposition of 1867. In that year, however, he was to suffer two personal tragedies. First Mawson died in an explosion. Then Frances White Swan, whom he had married in 1862 and who had borne him four children, died suddenly of a fever contracted in childbirth. It was well into the 1870’s before Swan had stabilized his family and business life. He was married to his late wife’s sister, Hannah White, who bore him five more children, and found new partners for the pharmaceutical and chemical firm of Swan and Mawson. In 1877, electricity generation and vacuum technology had advanced far enough to justify another attempt at the electric light. Swan hired Charles Stearn, a bank clerk turned vacuum experimenter, to assist him in experiments on producing light by the incandescence of carbon.

By February, 1878, he was probably closer to this goal than any of his several worldwide rivals when he demonstrated publicly at Newcastle a light based on the now-familiar combination of carbon conductor and evacuated glass bulb. At that time, his great American rival, Thomas Edison, was still concentrating on unworkable schemes involving platinum conductors turned on and off frequently by thermostats.

However, Swan’s was not yet a practical lamp. He stalled at this point for the next several months. Meanwhile, Edison made two crucial decisions: to return to carbon, perhaps inspired in part by Swan’s success, which was reported in the technical press, and to use a hair-thin, high-resistance filament as his conductor, rather than the thicker, lower-resistance rods or strips used by Swan and others. Early in 1880, after Edison had publicly unveiled his filament, Swan followed with a similar design. He proceeded to make several improvements to filament manufacture. The judgment of historians is that he emerged a close but distinct second to Edison as inventor of the practical incandescent lamp .

In 1881, backed by Newcastle investors, Swan incorporated the Swan Electric Light Company, a successful venture for the manufacture and sale of incandescent lamps. This led to a patent suit by Edison, in which, if brought to trial, Swan foresaw, “the word ’filament’ [would be] strongly insisted on.” Forestalling a trial, the parties compromised, and in 1884 the Edison and Swan United Electric Company was formed. For several years thereafter, it dominated Great Britain’s electric light manufacturing business.

Swan moved on to other areas of invention, developing an improved form of the lead acid storage battery and carrying out work on copper brazing and the fuel cell. The best known of his later inventions were spin-offs of his light bulb work. Seeking to perfect the filament during the mid-1880’s, he decided that the best results would come from making a carbon structure with uniform properties. Assisted by Leigh S. Powell, Swan found a practical solvent for gun-cotton (nitrocellulose) and squeezed the resulting paste through a die to make fine, uniform threads. Swan soon recognized that they had possibilities as fabrics as well as filaments. Hannah Swan knitted some into lace, which was exhibited in 1885 under the name “artificial silk.” This was a milestone on the path to the invention of rayon and the development of the artificial fiber industry. Swan himself, however, left the exploitation of this invention to others.

During the late 1880’s, he widened his interest to carry out scientific researches on the electrodeposition of copper and the stress in materials produced by high electric fields. The quality of his research won for him election as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1894. He earned many other honors, including the presidencies of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Society for Chemical Industry, and the Faraday Society. Swan was knighted in 1904. In 1908, he retired to Warlingham on the North Downs of Surrey.

The leisure of his later years allowed full expression of the personal qualities that he had displayed throughout his life: fairness, an open mind, modesty, gentleness, and courtesy. All rested, however, as an associate recalled, on “a tranquil undercurrent of dignity and power.” Dark, slim, and serious in his youth, he matured into a plump patriarch with a long white beard and sparkling eyes, a writer of lively letters with occasional bursts of poetic imagination. He was a rigid teetotaler, an optimist, a liberal in politics, and a great believer in the progressive influence of science, always emphasizing that the value of science was greater than any material improvement. He died peacefully at Warlingham on May 27, 1914.

Significance

Joseph Wilson Swan was born into the nineteenth century world of the heroic inventor-craftspeople immortalized by Samuel Smiles. He survived to see a world of giant corporations and government- and industry-sponsored laboratories. His own work linked the two eras. His inventing showed a sure sense for picking the field that was ripe for a major step and a sure hand at experiment and improvement.

Swan’s efforts in electric lighting and artificial fibers stopped just short of total success but placed him among the top few major contributors in each area. Unlike his great rival Edison, he was not a footloose independent entrepreneur and self-promoter. Instead, he invented from a secure base in an established industrial community. He was welcome in the university laboratory, the scientific society’s meeting hall, the government hearing room, or the businessperson’s office, and his activities foreshadowed the formalizing of such ties into the academic-industrial-government science-and-technology complex of the twenty-first century. However, Swan operated with a nineteenth century optimist’s independence and dignity that inventors of any era could well emulate.

Bibliography

Bazerman, Charles. The Languages of Edison’s Light. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Describes how Edison and his colleagues created a system of symbols and communication to describe the new invention of electric lighting. Includes information about Swan.

Chirnside, R. C. “Sir Joseph Swan and the Invention of the Electric Lamp.” Electronics and Power, February, 1979, 95-100. Discusses Swan’s contribution to electric lighting technology, and the Edison-Swan rivalry.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, FRS, Pharmacist, Chemist, Electrical Engineer. Newcastle-on-Tyne, England: Newcastle-on-Tyne Philosophical Society, 1979. Discussion by a chemist of Swan’s work in the context of Newcastle science and technology, adding technical background not available in the inventor’s biography.

Clouth, Diane. Joseph Wilson Swan, 1828-1914. Gateshead, England: Tyne-and-Wear Archives, 1979. Well-illustrated history of Swan’s achievements and local developments; gives a good sense of the context of Swan’s life and work.

Dyson, James. A History of Great Inventions. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001. Chapter 4, “1830-1899: Electricity on the Move,” mentions Swan in its overview of nineteenth century inventions.

Flatow, Ira. The Fascinating Stories Behind the Great Inventions That Changed Our Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Chapter 3, “Whose Light Bulb? Edison in a New Light,” includes information about Swan’s contributions to the invention of electric lighting.

Swan, Mary E., and Kenneth R. Swan. Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, FRS, Inventor and Scientist. London: Ernest Benn, 1928. Well-written biography by two of Swan’s children. Contains many valuable personal details and clear, nontechnical descriptions of his major inventions.

Wise, George. “Swan’s Way.” IEEE Spectrum 19 (April, 1982): 66-72. Describes Swan’s inventive style, especially in contrast with that of his rival Edison, and indicates how those differences in style led to Edison’s victory in the electric lamp race, but also to Swan’s harmonious and productive total career.