Introduction: A new perspective [Scanning Our Past]

All electrical engineers share a common heritage of discovery and invention, but that heritage is a complex one. The story is not a simple, linear progression from the earliest days of electricity to our modern world where nearly everything can be powered by electricity or controlled by electronics. Rather, it is a story with many strands running in parallel. Often workers in different places have met to exchange ideas or have read of each others´ work in the journals. Ideas have then been followed up with the result that similar developments have sometimes been made quite independently in different places. There is then plenty of scope for debating who really did what first, and it explains why Englishmen know that Joseph Swan invented the incandescent filament lamp while Americans know with equal certainty that it was invented by Thomas Edison. The development of the incandescent filament lamp in the UK is reviewed.