Joseph Swan in his workshop, sometime before 1907. He had been working on lightbulbs since 1850, but recognition did not come until 1880.
ON December 28, 1881, the D’Oyly Carte Opera company presented ‘Patience’ at the Savoy, their theatre in the Strand. Words were by W. S. Gilbert, music was by Arthur Sullivan.
Lighting was by Joseph Swan, a chemist from Newcastle who had already patented a form of photographic paper that had revolutionised the camera.
Swan’s no less revolutionary incandescent lightbulbs had been used in the auditorium since the Savoy opened that year, but now they replaced flickering, smoky gaslights on the stage, allowing the audience to see the costumes in a more natural light, and breathe cleaner air.
Fears of fire or electrocution were allayed when the owner, Richard D’Oyly Carte, deliberately smashed a brightly-burning bulb wrapped in muslin, which was not even scorched.
The Savoy thus joined Swan’s own house in Gateshead, the transatlantic liner ‘City of Richmond’, and the Northumberland residence of industrialist Sir William Armstrong, as the first places anywhere in the world to have electric lighting installed throughout.
Précis
The first public building to be lit entirely by electricity was the Savoy theatre in London, at a Christmas performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Patience’. The theatre’s owner demonstrated the safety of the new lights, invented by Newcastle-based chemist Joseph Swan, and the audience could judge for themselves how superior they were to yellow, flickering and smoky gaslight. (58 / 60 words)
