Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914), English chemist, physicist and inventor with 60 patents. Though his international fame rests on the incandescent light bulb, he made pioneering contributions in a number of photographic fields. His firm, Mawson and Swan, manufactured scientific apparatus and chemicals and was famous for its collodion. In 1877 Swan started production of dry plates coated with photo-sensitive gelatin emulsion. He also introduced silver bromide paper for mass-production printing, nitro-cellulose films, automatic plate-coating machines and a commercially successful carbon printing process. In 1881, after many years of experimentation, he invented a practical incandescent light bulb employing a cellulose filament. In the USA Thomas Edison had also produced a successful incandescent bulb, and in 1883 Swan and Edison joined forces, creating the ???diswan??Company.