The Edison and Swan United Electric Light…

The Edison and Swan United Electric Light Company is established in 1883.

Known commonly as Ediswan, the company sells lamps made with the cellulose filament that Joseph Swan had invented in 1881.

Variations of the cellulose filament will become an industry standard, except with the Edison Company.

Thomas Edison will continue using bamboo filaments until the 1892 merger that creates Edison General Electric, and that company will then shift to cellulose.

Swan, while searching for a better filament for his light bulb, had inadvertently made another advance.

In 1881, he had developed and patented a process for squeezing nitro-cellulose through holes to form conducting fibers.

His newly established company used Swan's cellulose filaments in their bulbs.

The textile industry will also use this process.

The common coupling of Swan's name with that of Thomas Edison in connection with the incandescent electric lamp has often led to the notion that Swan collaborated with Edison in this invention.

That is not so.

Their work is completely independent, and although each knows the other is working on the problem of devising a practical lamp, they have neither met nor communicated with each other.

The conjunction of their names comes about in 1883 when the two competing companies merge to exploit both Swan's and Edison's inventions.

In Britain, Swan had been able to obtain a patent on the incandescent lamp; though Edison had already been making successful lamps for some time, his patent application, incompletely prepared, had failed.

Unable to raise the required capital in Britain because of this, Edison is forced to enter into a joint venture with Swan.

In America, Edison had been working on copies of the original light bulb patented by Swan, trying to make them longer-lasting and more efficient, as Swan's earlier bulbs lacked the high resistance needed to be an effective part of an electrical utility.

Though Swan had beaten him to this goal, Edison has obtained patents in America for a fairly direct copy of the Swan light, and has started an advertising campaign that claims that he was the real inventor.

Swan, who is less interested in making money from the invention, has agreed that Edison can sell the lights in America while he retains the rights in Britain.

Swan acknowledges that Edison had anticipated him, saying "Edison is entitled to more than I ... he has seen further into this subject, vastly than I, and foreseen and provided for details that I did not comprehend until I saw his system".