Joseph Swan's Electric Light

Origin
Joseph Swan created the first incandescent light bulb in 1879, demonstrating its brilliance at a lecture. Although commonly attached to Thomas Edison’s projects, they were never actually involved in creating their most famed inventions. They agreed upon Edison selling in America and Swan retaining rights and profits his bulbs made in England.

Swan later founded the company Edison & Swan to manufacture his bulbs. Edison knew that suing for copyright infringement would lead any investigation to discover Swan created the first incandescent. Instead, Edison negotiated a company merger that brought Swan’s patents under ownership of General Electric.

Collection
Edison found this particular bulb during the shipment of Swan’s research and prototypes to his laboratory in Menlo Park. While fiddling with the filament in an experiment, he discovered its effects to be most interesting. Correspondence between him and Swan revealed Swan passed the bulb to Edison to see if he could decipher the source of its abilities. The mechanism that powered it remained unsolvable to Edison, so he donated it to the Warehouse along with several other trinkets he had picked up.

Effects
When turned on, it extrudes a solid light substance. The light substance is very flexible, but it can shatter easily when compressed. Rubbing it can cause objects to alternate between dark and light shades, similar to the constant switching of an electrical circuit. Direct contact will cause the user’s facial features and body shape to appear different than normal. All nearby onlookers will constantly mistake them for someone else.