SECOND TO LORD KELVIN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 12, 2 June 1914, Page 4

SECOND TO LORD KELVIN.

Among tho men of his time in Great Britain, the late Sir Joseph Swan stood second only to Lord Kelvin in respect of the number and importance of his inventions. It is interesting to record of the inventor of the Swan lamp that during a series of experiments conducted in Scotland when he was ten years of age, he was put on a Btool, with a chain in his hand, and made to deliver from the tips of this fingers and the point of Mia nose the sparks from an electrical machine. Before long lie had made a macihine for himself. Also he had injured himself in an attempt to make hydrogen; but he had made coal-gas from the kitchen fire with much happier results. The best that could be done with such a boy, his friends thought, .was to put him in a chemist's fehop; and so he was apprenticed to a chemist at Sunderland, where ho learned little or nothing of the kind of chemistry in which he desired to advance himself, but much about business, which afterwards stood him in good stead. By 1.879 he had invented a practical incandescent electric lamp, and with tho lute Lord Armstrong in the chair, he lectured on the subject of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, lighting tho building, meanwhile, by means of his new discovery. Two years later he again lectured in the same place with the same chairman, his lamp having by this time assumed almost its final form and character, and whilst the lecture proceeded two of the streets of Newcastle were illuminated by festoons of electric light. "I don't care whether my name comes first or that of Ellison," said Mr Swan, when the Edison-Swan company was being formed; but it is now universally admitted that his was tho priority in the production of the electric lamp, like the incandescent lamp now in use, in which the light was produced by the passage of an electric current through a filament of carbon. Other inventions of Sir Joseph, who was knighted in 1904, have had a really enormous influence on the development of photography and book and newspaper illustration. He was, for example, the inventor of the rapid dry plate, which brought about a kind of photographic revolution, and in later years lie carried on an enormous maunfacture of diry plates at Heme Hill. He mis the inventor of at least three different processes of printing by mechanical means from photographically engraved plates, or what is now known in the world of illustration as "process work." In one of these he was associated with Mr Woodbury, whose mechanical appliances proved to be superior to those of Mr Swan, and the process was worked for mutual advantage as the Woodbury type. A riiiner's safety lamp was another of the great inventions of this great electrician, to whom tlho world is indebted for something dono in most of tho fields of scientific endeavour.