‘DURING a series of experiments in Sunderland when he was ten years of age, he was put on a stool with a chain in his hand and made to deliver, from the tips of his fingers and the point of his nose, sparks from an electrical machine,” said The Northern Echo in an obituary in 1914.

“Before long he had made such a machine himself and he had injured himself in an attempt to make hydrogen. But he made coal gas from the kitchen fire with much happier results.”

This child prodigy was Joseph Swan and, as you may have noticed on Tuesday in our business supplement when the clever people at Sedgefield’s NetPark unveiled their paper-thin lighting technology, he illuminated our world most profoundly exactly 130 years ago.

He invented the lightbulb. Without it, our lives would be extremely dull.

Joseph was born at Bishopwearmouth – near the Stadium of Light – in 1828. His father John was clearly inventive. Said the Echo: “He devised an improved anchor, a life-saving appliance and a system of fog signals but doesn’t appear to have profited by his ingenuity for he had no means of giving his son a good start in life.” Other, of course, than forcing him to stand on a stool with sparks streaming from his nose.

At 12, the boy left school. At 14 he became an apprentice chemist with John Mawson in Newcastle.

He, too, had a curious turn of mind for he fatally blew himself up on the Town Moor when an explosive experiment went wrong.

Life was dangerous in those days. Gaslights had a horrible habit of going bang, and the electric alternative, arc lights – where a brilliant spark jumps between electrodes – were just as dubious.

The light at the end of the tunnel for 19th Century scientists was the creation of a safer incandescent bulb, one in which a filament was heated so that it created light but did not burn away. In 1860, Joseph though he had cracked it. He coated a fine piece of paper with carbon and put a current through it. Disappointingly, it only glowed red hot. He put his filament away and concentrated on pioneering photography.

In the 1870s, vacuum-making technology advanced.

A vacuum was crucial to the lightbulb because if you can remove all the oxygen then the filament cannot burn away. On December 18, 1878 Joseph proudly demonstrated his new lightbulb to the Newcastle Chemical Society.

He’d made a carbon-coated filament out of a cotton fibre and placed it inside a glass vacuum.

How, exactly 130 years ago, the chemists must have gasped as the bulb glowed brightly before their eyes. Momentarily. Then it went pop. Undeterred, Joseph refined his bulb and made his home – 99, Kells Lane in Gateshead, now a residential home – the first in the world to be lit by electricity.

On October 20, 1880, he arrived at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, asked for the 70 gasjets to be turned down and replaced their light with 20 of his lightbulbs.

A new age dawned.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Edison had independently used the same cotton technique to create light. Although Swan had patented his idea a year before Edison, the pair skirmished with lawsuits before deciding to join forces.

“I don’t care whether my name comes first or that of Mr Edison,” said Joseph, and so it became the Edi-Swan Company.

Two years later, Joseph sold all his rights to the American and went back to photography, which is why all the world thinks Edison invented the lightbulb and not a bright spark from Wearside with electrical charges shooting out of his nose.