ELECTRIC LIGHT

Evening Star, Issue 20255, 16 August 1929, Page 9

ELECTRIC LIGHT

WHO INVENTED IT? RIVAL CLAIMS OF. U.S. AND BRITAIN. . LONDON, July 31. Last December tho Institution of Electrical Engineers held a celebration in London of the jubilee of the discovery of electric lighting by an Englishman. Last_ month the United States 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 lighting. 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 yeai’ before Swan. But in 1856 Swan had demonstrated tho possibility of illuminating tho South Foreland (Kent) lighthouse experimentally in the presence of the great scientist Faraday himself, and in 1862 lighting by carbon lilaments was officially installed in tho lighthouse at Dungeness. It was in 1845 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 aJluminant, but found that the soot clouded the glass so quickly that they were useless _ Then it struck him that the soot particles were only passengers on the air outside the bulb. He devised a means of removing all the air from the blub with the help, of a bank clerk in Birkenhead , named Charles H. Steam, and the‘ modern electric light globe 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.