Sir James
Swinburne
Bart. FRS
(1858 - 1958)
|
James Swinburne was born in
Inverness on 28 February 1858. He served an
apprenticeship at a locomotive works in
Manchester before becoming an electrical engineer.
Swinburne became an outstanding
figure in the electrical industry. He worked with
Swan on the first electric light bulb and coined
the words 'stator' and 'rotor'. He was the first
President of the Institution of Electrical
Engineers and the nominees for his Fellowship of
the Royal Society included some of the most
illustrious names in science - Kelvin, Crookes,
and Lodge among others.
Swinburne became interested in
the potential of plastics in 1902 when he was
introduced to a product of the phenol
formaldehyde reaction. He formed a small London-based
company, Fireproof Celluloid Syndicate Limited,
to research and market the product. Although they
were unable to produce a good, solid resin or
moulding material, they were able to make an
excellent hard lacquer for coating metals such as
brass - then in fashion for making bedsteads. In
1910, the Syndicate was wound-up and its assets
transferred to a new company, The Damard Lacquer
Company Limited with a small factory in Bradford
Street, Birminghan in the heart of the brass
industry.
Although Swinburne had taken out
a number of patents, the more important of these
were pre-dated by those of Leo Baekeland in the
USA whose researches and development of a range
of phenol formaldehyde-based products, which sold
under the Bakelite trademark, were hugely
successful in many parts of the world. In 1927,
Swinburne concluded an agreement with Baekeland
in which the Damard Lacquer Company was merged
with two other English companies, Moldensite
Limited of Darley Dale and Redmanol Limited of
London (both lincensees of Baekeland's patents
and controlled by him) to form a new company,
Bakelite Limited, to exploit Baekeland's products
in the UK and elsewhere. Sir James Swinburne was
appointed its first Chairman and in September
1927 production of Bakelite materials began at a
new factory purpose built on a 29½ acre site in
Tyseley, Birmingham.
|