Joseph Swan

Sir Joseph Wilson Swan was an English physicist, chemist and inventor, born at Pallion Hall near Sunderland in 1828. He was apprenticed to a firm of Sunderland pharmacists and then joined Mawson, a firm of manufacturing chemists in Newcastle upon Tyne. He was an independent early developer of a successful incandescent light bulb, demonstrated his carbon lamp to the Newcastle Chemical Society in December 1878 and to a large audience in February 1879, and by 1881 his company made lamps commercially; the Savoy Theatre in London was lit with them that year. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1894, president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1898, and the first president of the Faraday Society in 1903.