Science and technology in the United States finish. For example, the British engineer Joseph Swan built an incandescent electric lamp in 1860, almost 20 years before Edison. But Edison's light bulbs lasted much longer than Swan's, and they could be turned on and off individually, while Swan's bulbs could be used only in a system where several lights were turned on or off at the same time. Edison followed up his improvement of the light bulb with the development of electrical generating systems. Within 30 years, his inventions had introduced electric lighting into millions of homes. Another landmark application of scientific ideas to practical uses was the
St. George Lane Fox-Pitt December 1879, Charles Francis Brush founded the Anglo American Electric Light Company Ltd. in the UK and then acquired the patent rights to produce the Lane-Fox incandescent lamp in the same year. On 24 March 1880, he founded a new company, Anglo-American Brush Electric Light Corporation, which took over the previous one. About 1880, Fox-Pitt is said to have successfully experimented with charred plant fibers as the filament material. That was about the same time as the development of the light bulb with carbon filament by Edison in the United States. By 1883, Fox-Pitt had obtained further patents. Fox-Pitt wrote