Joseph Swan was born at Pallion Hall in Sunderland. He got most of his education from observing the fascinating industrial processes going on around him and at 14, he became an apprentice druggist. He attended lectures at the Sunderland Athenaeum and read of attempts to produce incandescent light bulbs, as opposed to arc lighting. W.E. Staite's lectures planted the dream in Swan, even at this early age, of one day bringing these attempts to fruition.
In Newcastle he joined the firm of John Mawson as a chemist and his work soon moved on to the study of light and electricity. It had already been shown that wires or filaments could be heated by passing electricity through them, but the filament would quickly burn out, oxidising in the air. After many failed experiments, Swan's interest abated. It returned, however, when he heard that experiments could be carried out in a vacuum. The first efficient vacuum pump was introduced in the early 1870s. Using a bulb containing a carbon filament, Swan was able to seal the bulb after all the air had been removed. When an electric current was applied, the carbon filament glowed brightly, but did not oxidise due to the absence of air, allowing the filament to glow continuously.
Swan described his bulb on 19 December 1878 and before a fascinated audience of 700 at the Literary and Philosophical Society on 3 February 1879, with Sir William Armstrong in the chair, he demonstrated his invention. The Lit and Phil was thus the first public building in the world to be lit by electric light bulbs. Edison who had been working along similar lines, is usually held to be the inventor of the filament lamp but, strictly speaking, Swan has the priority. He was using a carbon filament two decades before Edison, it was just that he couldn't get light bulbs in which the vacuum was good enough. His demonstration at the Lit and Phil came nine months before Edison managed to get a bulb to burn for thirteen hours continuously, using carbonised thread as a filament. For various reasons, Swan did not patent his bulb, whereas Edison did - leading to a controversy over priority. The Swan Electric Light Company was formed in 1881 and eventually, Edison and Swan formed a joint company (Ediswan) in Great Britain in 1883.
Mosley Street in Newcastle, outside Swan's workshop, was the first street in Britain to be lit by electric light bulbs (1880) and is said to have been the first in the world (c 1814) to be lit by gas. A plaque to Swan can be seen inside these premises. Sir Joseph Swan's villa, still standing at 99 Kells Lane, Underhill, Gateshead, was the first private house in England to be lit by electric light and Swan bulbs were installed in Lord Armstrong's mansion, Cragside, near Rothbury in November 1880. James Coxon, the draper in Market Street was the first to have his shop lit be electricity. In 1882, a number of public buildings in London were lit, including the Mansion House and the Royal Academy. D'Oyly Carte adopted the new lighting for the Savoy Operas with 825 lamps on stage and 370 in other parts of the house. Swan also had a contract to light the Paris Opera.