(1828–1914). The English physicist and chemist Joseph Swan produced an early electric light bulb and invented the dry photographic plate. These inventions resulted in a significant improvement in photography and a step toward the development of modern photographic film.
Joseph Wilson Swan was born on October 31, 1828, in Sunderland, Durham. He served an apprenticeship with a druggist in his hometown and later became a partner in a firm of manufacturing chemists in Newcastle. Working with wet photographic plates, he noticed that heat increased the sensitivity of the silver bromide emulsion. By 1871 he had devised a method of drying the wet plates, initiating the age of convenience in photography. Eight years later he patented bromide paper, the paper commonly used in modern photographic prints.
Some years earlier, in 1860, Swan developed a primitive electric light that utilized a filament of carbonized paper in an evacuated glass bulb. The lack of a good vacuum and an adequate electric source, however, resulted in a short lifetime for the bulb and inefficient light. His design was substantially the one used by Thomas Alva Edison nearly 20 years later. In 1880, after the improvement of vacuum techniques, both Swan and Edison produced a practical light bulb. Three years later, while searching for a better carbon filament for his light bulb, Swan patented a process for squeezing nitrocellulose through holes to form fibers. The textile industry has used his process. Swan was knighted in 1904. He died on May 27, 1914, in Warlingham, Surrey.