ELECTRIC LIGHT.

Putaruru Press, Volume VII, Issue 305, 12 September 1929, Page 8

ELECTRIC LIGHT.

WHO INVENTED IT, Last December the Institution of Electrical Engineers held a celebration in London of the. jubilee of the discovery of electric light by an Englishman. The United States in June issued a special postage stamp for the same purpose with the difference that they claim it as an American invention.

It was Sir Joseph Wilso Swan, F.R.S., a native of Sunderland, who discovered electric light (says the London, “ Sunday Times ”). Edison followed, up Swan’s work, and the two subsequently entered into a business partnership, although they never met personally. Edison obtained his patent in 1879, a year before Swan. But in 1856 Swan had demonstrated the possibility of illuminating the South Foreland (Kent) lighthouse experimental'y in the presence of the great scientist Faraday himself, and in 1862 lighting by carbon filaments was officially installed in the lighthouse at Dungeness.

It wjas in 1945, when he was only 17 years of age, that Swan listened to a lecture at the Sunderland Athenaeum that gave him his first idea. He tried to use pieces of paper impregnated with carbon as his illuminant, but found that soot clouded the glass so quickly that they were useless. Then it struck him that the soot partie’es were only passengers on the inside of the bulb. He demised a means of removing all the air from the bulb with the help of a bank clerk in Birkenhead named Charles H. Stearn, and the modern electric bulb was born.

Swan was knighted in 1904 and died in 1914. He had left to his country, to industry, and to the world three great bequests—electric lighting, artificial silk, and bromide printing.