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Scanning Our Past
Introduction: A New Perspective
Doesthepastlookdifferentwhenscannedfromadifferentviewpoint? Is the view from over here the same as the viewfrom over there? Readers of this column may soon discover,because Jim Brittain has retired after scanning the past forthis journal since January 1991. Now the Editor has inviteda British writer, a member of the IEE, to contribute. Willthat make a difference? We speak almost the same language,though the fact that my spelling checker is set to “British”and not “American” will occasionally
colour 
what I write.
 A Heritage of Discovery
Whatever their viewpoint, all electrical engineers share acommon heritage of discovery and invention, but that her-itage is a complex one. The story is not a simple, linear pro-gression from the earliest days of electricity to our modernworld where nearly everything can be powered by electricityor controlled by electronics. Rather it is a story with manystrands running in parallel. Often workers in different placeshavemettoexchangeideasorhavereadofeachothers’work in the journals. That, after all, is a main function of our pro-fessional institutions. Ideas have then been followed up withthe result that similar developments have sometimes beenmade quite independently in different places. There is thenplenty of scope for debating who really did what first, andit explains why Englishmen know that Joseph Swan (Fig.1) invented the incandescent filament lamp while Americansknow with equal certainty that it was invented by ThomasEdison. (In truth, many Englishmen think Edison inventedeverything electrical, but that is a measure of the strength of the Edison PR machine.)
The Light of Lamps
The truth is far more complex than a simple choice be-tween two ingenious men. The idea of producing light bysealing a conductor in a glass vessel and heating it electri-cally is older than either Swan or Edison. Writing in 1845,William Grove (Fig. 2) described how he had made and usedsuch a “lamp” a few years earlier, and he described it as “thecommon lecture-table experiment.” But it was not a prac-tical source of light: the only possible filament material at
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9219(00)02957-1.
the time was platinum, as any other material would oxidizeat white heat unless the air were pumped out to a degreethat was not possible at the time. The invention of the mer-cury pump in the 1870’s, and the development of practicalgenerators in place of expensive batteries, prompted freshefforts. By the end of that decade several people had man-aged to make a lamp with a carbon filament connected bywires sealed through a glass bulb that was adequately evac-uated. Edison had most commercial success in America, andSwan in Britain, but other inventors in both countries alsosucceeded in makingand selling lamps:the American HiramMaxim and the Englishman St. George Lane Fox both alsoexhibitedtheirlamps atthefirstgreat InternationalElectricalExhibition, held in Paris in 1881 (Fig. 3), and there was notreally much to choose between the four of them.
Fig. 1. Joseph Swan was a British incandescent lamp pioneer.(Courtesy of the IEE Archives, London, U.K.)0018–9219/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 88, NO. 4, APRIL 2000 597
 
Fig. 2. William Grove experimented with primitive lamps in 1845.(Courtesy of the IEE Archives, London, U.K.)
 Holborn and Pearl
A children’s history book I read many years ago com-ments that “History to the English is the story of the thingsthat happened in England together with those English ex-ploits abroad that can be remembered without embarrass-ment.” Every nation will naturally favor its home-grown he-roes and the “Edison–Swan” discussion will undoubtedlycontinueeventhough theircarbon filamentswere abandonedin favor of tungsten almost a century ago. What about theembarrassment? American writing often describes Edison’sPearl Street Power Station in New York, which opened inSeptember 1882, as theworld’s first public electricitysupplyundertaking,yetearlierthatyearEdisonhadopenedastationinLondon,atHolbornViaduct.ItwasnotagreatsuccessandperhapsitwasanembarrassmenttotheEdisoncamp,butoneof its customers, the City Temple, a Congregational Churchon Holborn Viaduct, is still pleased to be known as the firstchurch to have electric light—thanks to Edison.
Seven Private Customers
In his new biography of Edison, P. Israel calls the HolbornViaduct Station an experiment, a much kinder description,but any embarrassment it may have caused cannot have beenas great as the embarrassment felt by William Siemens (Fig.4). He was involved with the electricity supply which beganat Godalming, Surrey, in November 1881—the British
Fig. 3. International Electrical Exhibition, Paris, France, 1881, which featured four versions of earlyelectrical lamps. (Courtesy of the IEE Archives, London, U.K.)
598 PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 88, NO. 4, APRIL 2000
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