The Birth of Light: Joseph Swan’s Incandescent Bulb

The Birth of Light: Joseph Swan, Lord Armstrong, and the Electrical Revolution

The history of the nineteenth century is frequently written in steam and coal - a narrative dominated by the blackened skies of industrial Britain. Yet, in the burgeoning industrial hubs of Northern England, specifically along the banks of the Tyne and the Wear, a silent revolution was being engineered that would eventually banish the very darkness that defined the Victorian age. Contrary to the popular belief that links electric light exclusively to the name Thomas Edison, the true cradle of the incandescent bulb was not Menlo Park, New Jersey, but the rigorous industrial landscape of Tyneside.

The Spinning Jenny: The Engine of Revolution

Legend has it that in 1764, a weaver named James Hargreaves in Stanhill, Lancashire, watched his daughter Jenny knock over a spinning wheel. Seeing the spindle continue to revolve upright, an idea struck him: could a single wheel turn multiple spindles?

The result was the Spinning Jenny, a machine that allowed one worker to spin eight threads at once. Later versions would manage eighty.

The Disruption

Before the Jenny, spinning was a cottage industry, done by women at home using a single-thread wheel. It was slow and could not keep up with the demand from weavers. Hargreaves’ invention broke this bottleneck, but it also threatened livelihoods.