James Bowman Lindsay

James Bowman Lindsay was a Scottish inventor and writer, born September 8, 1799 in Carmyllie, Angus and died June 29, 1862 in Dundee, credited with an early and largely unexploited demonstration of electric lighting. After matriculating at the University of St Andrews in 1821, he became a lecturer in science and mathematics at the Watt Institution in Dundee from 1829, and in July 1835 he demonstrated a constant electric lamp at a public meeting in Dundee bright enough, by his own account, to read a book by at a distance of about a foot and a half, decades before incandescent lighting became commercially practical in the hands of Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison; Lindsay himself did little afterward to establish his priority or develop the device commercially. He turned most of his later attention to wireless telegraphy, patenting a system for transmitting signals through water in 1854 and giving a public demonstration at Portsmouth about two years before his death, and he also worked on submarine telegraphy, electric arc welding of cables, and sacrificial anodes to prevent metal corrosion, alongside publishing an 1858 set of astronomical tables he called the Chrono-Astrolabe.