Joseph Swan

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory of natural selection completely independently on opposite sides of the world and within weeks of each other.

And even the light bulb, Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan developed almost identical carbon filament bulbs within months of each other, and they were working independently on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

It's as if ideas have their own timing, their own urgency, and when they're ready to be born, they'll knock on as many doors as it takes.

Rick Rubin has witnessed this many times over his long, influential career.

Someone says Alexander Graham Bell, and someone yells into the void the name Antonio Meucci.

Edison himself, with the light bulb, is countered with Joseph Swan.

But this one, the phonograph, this one was Edison.

and people freaked out.

Yeah.

The rivalry between Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan.

Right.

The history books, at least the ones in the U.S., often frame this as Edison inventing the bulb out of thin air and everyone else copying him.

But looking at the sources, Joseph Swan in the U.K. was developing carbonized filaments inside vacuum bulbs at the exact same time.

Yes, he was.

Swan's patents were so solid that he actually sued Edison for infringement in the UK, won, and forced Edison to merge their British operations into a joint company called Edison.

If you've ever taken any course in advertising, if you've taken a course in mass media in the American 20th century, heck, if you even watch Mad Men or seen a cigarette ad, then you're familiar with his work.

He's also the reason we celebrate Thomas Edison and not Joseph Swan as the inventor of the light bulb.

He's the guy who, after helping popularize bananas for United Fruit, turned around and waged a propaganda campaign alongside the CIA to stage a coup in Guatemala.

And that relates to our book, the Samson Murray book, The Fish That Ate the Well, by Rich Cohen.

What strikes you about the works on show at The Art-- uh, The Light?

It's an incredibly ambitious show, and I think it's a very smart move to begin, not just to touch on the fantastic track record that Durham has with the Light Festival, and also, let's not forget that Durham is the home of Joseph Swan, the inventor of the light bulb.

Mm-hmm.

And apparently, the Venerable Bede even tracked the, tracked the lumina- lum- lunar cycles.

... which we now obviously, uh, give him credit for.

In February of 1879, Joseph Swan, who was an Englishman, had a carbon filament lamp, uh, that worked under the same technology, but it was, uh, a bit more impractical.

His was very large and, like, took up a, a...

It, it wouldn't have worked in the same way as Edison's light bulb.

So there are just a lot of forgotten inventors who may have, in a world, been given credit for the, that thing, but it ended up going to someone else.

This is kind of fun.

It says a later Edison lamp actually used a cellulose filament based on an invention by Joseph Swan.

So he ended up, uh, using a piece from Swan in one of his own lamps.