All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

Coming of Electric Lighting 227 Edison achieved success with this filament in October, 1879, but in February of the same year Swan had startled the world by exhibiting publicly at a meeting of the Newcastle Chemical Society the lamp which he had made in i860, the current for which, as in i860, was obtained from a battery of 50 cells. This exhibition aroused widespread interest, which culminated in Mr. Swan installing lamps of his design to illuminate the rooms of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophic Society. In other words, incandescent electric lighting had been adopted and put into operation in Britain at a day when Edison had not carried his lamp to a laboratory success. In the meantime, Swan had satisfied himself that the filament would have to be improved, and was struggling with this phase while Edison was still ex- perimenting with the carbonised cotton-thread. Edi- son, who had found that a piece of bamboo when carbonised, made an excellent filament, created at- tention by dispatching expeditions to all parts of the world in search of a still better fibre for the pur- pose. Meantime the British inventor was labouring diligently and silently in his laboratory in another channel altogether, and in which, strange to relate, his American rival likewise turned his thoughts at a later date. Swan was trying to discover a synthetic sub- stance, which would be equal to the natural fibre. Here he achieved distinct success, because he was the first to evolve and to perfect the squirting pro- cess which is now used all over the world in connection with the preparation of the filament. This brought about the first commercial “ subdivision of the elec-