1367
trained as a chemist. Earlier in his career he was appoint-
ment as an assistant, and later partner, to the Newcastle
chemist John Mawson. The company later became
Mawson & Swan.
Swan is most widely remembered as the inventor of
the incandescent fi lament electric light bulb in 1860.
Due to the poor quality of vacuum pumps at the time,
it took a further twenty years before he was able to
demonstrate a lamp with suffi cient luminance to be
practical. By 1880 he had set up the Swan Electric Light
Company.
In photography, Swan is credited with the introduc-
tion of the fi rst practical carbon printing process in
1862—based on Alphonse Louis Poitevin’s 1855 patent.
He is also credited, in the 1870s, with the introduction
of the gelatine bromide dry plate which evolved into
the mainstay of the photographic industry and, a few
years later, with the introduction of bromide printing
papers.
With the chance discovery—while investigating
materials to make electric light bulb fi laments—of how
to make fi bres out of nitro-cellulose, he is credited with
the creation of one of the fi rst man-made fi bres, later
used widely in textile manufacture.
Swan was knighted in 1904, and died in Surrey on
May 27, 1914.
John Hannavy
SWEDEN
News of the invention of photography reached Sweden
with the speed of the stage-coach. Three weeks after
Daguerre’s invention had been briefl y announced in
Paris, a newspaper in Stockholm was able, on 28 January
1839, to report “one of the most important inventions of
the century.” More details became available during the
autumn, after Arago’s big introduction, and at Christ-
mas that year, the bookseller Adolf Bonnier published
a Swedish translation of Daguerre’s manual.
Among those who bought the book were, naturally
enough, the scientist Jacob Berzelius and his circle. He,
as well as Carl Wilhelm Scheele before him, had been
responsible for some of the chemical fi ndings which
made photography possible. The Swedish Academy of
Science published continuous reports on the advances
made in photography.
The pioneers, however, were to be found elsewhere.
G. A. Müller, stage designer at the Royal Opera, acquired
photographic equipment together with U. E. Manner-
hjerta, once a pioneer in lithography and at this time a
translator of French plays. Müller had learned his craft
as an assistant of Gropius in Berlin, the stage decora-
tor who had built his own Dioramas as direct copies of
Daguerre’s stage designs.
This was early in 1840, when another lithographer,
the young Liutenant L. J. Benzelstierna, received an
apparatus from the Swedish ambassador in Paris. In
September 1840, these three men exhibited their views
of Stockholm at the Royal Museum.
At the same time the visting French merchant Neu-
bourg exhibited his Daguerreotypes in the Old Town, a
few blocks away from the castle. One year had passed
since the offi cial announcement of the new invention,
and four photographers were already exhibiting.
Müller and Mannerhjerta soon abandoned the da-
guerreotype. Müller followed Daguerre and built a
Diorama in Stockholm. Benzelstierna became our fi rst
professional photographer, although not by selling his
images: He choose instead to demonstrate, for an ad-
mission charge, the entire complicated process involved
with the slivered copper plates. For almost two years he
travelled Sweden, photographing and exhibiting.
While Benzelstierna toured the countryside with his
rapidly ageing technique, new daguerreotypists were ap-
pearing in larger towns and cities. Many of the itinerant
photographers during the fi rst decades were Danish and
German. Some of them took their time to train assistants
and apprentices.
The greatest portraitist of this era was J. W. Berg-
ström, whose life began in poverty and ended in riches:
After ten years as a daguerreotypist he turned his interest
to industry and made a fortune as a manufacturer. He
left behind him a large work of masterly portraits, but
it is his pictures from the sphere of his private life that
attract our greatest interest.
Gradually, the itinerant daguerreotypists introduced
new methods as the ambrotype. The style remained
however the same. From the glass plates were also made
positives on salt or albumen paper. Paper was also tried
as negatives. The pioneers appear to have been David
Gibson in Gothenburg 1851 and the painter C G Car-
leman, who was later to be one of the inventors of the
halftone block. His fi rst halftone blocks were printed in
Swedish magazines in 1871.
The introduction of better negative-positive processes
and the carte-de-visite format created a boom. The
number of professional photographers increased from
12 in 1860 to 65 in 1865. Among them, an elite of about
20 organised themselves in a professional association.
The most legendary studio of the era was established
by Johannes Jaeger, a German who after a few iterant
years settled in Stockholm in 1863. In Gothenburg his
equivalent was Aron Jonason The artistically inspired
photographers included Frans Klemming, closely related
to the school of national romanticism.
While studio photography developed technically, the
fi rst amateurs appeared with a freedom to choose their
motifs. Carl Curman was a doctor, and the pioneer of the
Swedish bathing resort. As a photographer he empha-
sised the greatness of nature in a romantic style. Painter