The principle of incandescent lighting had been understood, and in fact conquered, for a surprisingly long time. As early as 1840, seven years before Thomas Edison was even born, Sir William Grove UK (1811-1896), a lawyer and judge who was also a brilliant amateur scientist with a particular interest in electricity, demonstrated an incandescent lamp which worked for several hours, but nobody wanted a light bulb that cost a lot to make and only worked for a few hours, so Grove didn’t pursue its development. In Newcastle, a young pharmacist and keen inventor named Joseph Swan UK (1828–1914) saw a demonstration of Grove’s light and made some successful experiments of his own, but the technology was lacking to get a really good vacuum in a bulb. Without that vacuum any filament would burn out quickly, making a bulb a costly, short-lived indulgence. Besides, Swan was interested in other matters, in particular photography, where he made many important contributions. He invented silver bromide photographic paper, which allowed the first high-quality photographic prints to be made, perfected the collodion process and also made several refinements to photographic chemicals. Meanwhile, his pharmaceutical business, which involved manufacturing as well as retailing, was booming. In 1867, his business partner and brother-in-law John Mawson died in a freak accident while disposing of nitroglycerine on a moor outside the city. It was, in short, a complicated and distracted time for Swan, and his interests moved away from illumination for thirty years. Then in the early 1870s Hermann Sprengel GER (1834–1906) working in London, invented a device that came to be called the Sprengel mercury pump. This was the crucial invention that actually made household illumination possible. Sprengel’s pump could reduce the amount of air in a glass chamber to one-millionth of its normal volume, which would enable a filament to glow for hundreds of hours. In January or February 1879, having rediscovered his interest in the field, Joseph Swan gave a public display of his new electric incandescent lamp in Newcastle. The vagueness of date is because it isn’t certain whether he demonstrated his lamp at a public lecture in January or merely talked about it; but the following month he most certainly fired it up to an appreciative audience. In either case, his demonstration was at least eight months ahead of anything Edison could manage. That same year Swan installed lights in his own home and by 1881 had wired up the house of the great scientist Lord Kelvin in Glasgow – again well ahead of anything Edison was able to achieve. adapted from At Home - A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (2010)
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 06:13:45 +0000
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