Sir Joseph Wilson Swan

At aged 14 he undertook a six-year apprenticeship with Sunderland pharmacists Hudson and Osbaldiston. Unfortunately they both died before his apprenticeship was completed.

Joseph then had to move to Newcastle and In 1846 his sister Elizabeth’s husband, John Mawson, offered him a partnership in a pharmaceutical business. Joseph was fascinated by the latest in photography and began to make collodion, a flammable solution used on photographic plates. And In 1862, he also invents a procedure for carbon printing in photography. And His knowledge of silver bromide emulsions led to him patenting the dry plate in 1871, and bromide photographic paper in 1879.

But Joseph had actually been working on light bulbs since the age of 21, using a carbonised filament inside a glass shell. And the light bulb that he invented was safer because he had made his filaments less flammable by removing virtually all of the oxygen by means of a vacuum.

And on November 27, 1880 Joseph obtained a British Patent for his bulb, and his house was the first in the world to have working light bulbs.

In 1881 London’s Savoy Theatre became the first building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Joseph supplied about 1,200 of his “incandescent lamps”. A year later, theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly staged the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Iolanthe.

At the show’s London premiere the fairy characters on stage were covered in small, battery powered lights created by the Sunderland inventor. And thats why the term ‘fairy lights’ has been used ever since.