Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/545

  in C. A. Faure's storage batteries by the invention of the cellular-surfaced lead plate—so formed as to hold securely the lead oxide—made possible the modern electrical accumulator; and his discovery of the extraordinary influence of the presence of a small quantity of gelatine in accelerating the deposition of copper in electrolytic cells rendered the rapid production of electrolytic copper a matter of certainty.

Swan was twice married: first, in 1862 to Frances (died 1868), daughter of William White; secondly, in 1871 to Hannah, sister of his first wife. He had four sons and four daughters who attained adult age. He died at Overhill, Warlingham, Surrey, 27 May 1914.

Swan received many distinctions in recognition of his remarkable work in applied science. In 1904 he was awarded the Hughes medal of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1894; and he was made an honorary fellow, and received the progress medal, of the Royal Photographic Society in 1902. He was president of the Institute of Electrical Engineers from 1898 to 1899; of the Society of Chemical Industry in 1900 and 1901; and first president of the Faraday Society from 1903 to 1904. He was made chevalier of the legion of honour in 1881, and was knighted in 1904.

 SWEET, HENRY (1845–1912), phonetician, comparative philologist, and anglicist, the eldest son of George Sweet, barrister-at-law, of the Inner Temple, by his wife, Agnes Nicholson, was born in London 15 September 1845. His father was of Frisian and West of England origin, his mother of Scottish birth. In his early life Sweet suffered under great physical disadvantages; as a boy he was subject to fits, and also to extreme short-sightedness, which made reading inconceivably difficult, until the defect was relieved in later years. In the subjects of which he became a master Sweet was largely self-taught. He began with an interest in alphabets; but the first advance in the direction of his life's work was due to his study of Rask's grammar of Anglo-Saxon.

Sweet's formal education began in his tenth year at a private school, Bruce Castle, Tottenham. At the age of sixteen he went to King's College School, London. In 1864 he gained experience of German philological method at the university of Heidelberg. After a short time in a merchant's office, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1869. He was ill fitted by nature and to some extent by the turn which his studies had taken, to adapt himself to the classical curriculum of the university. He won a Taylorian scholarship in German and gained thereby the favourable notice of Friedrich Max Müller, but his fourth class in literae humaniores (1873) did not commend him in the eyes of university or college authorities, and no position in Oxford was offered to him.

Sweet had, however, already contributed to the Proceedings of the London Philological Society, and had published in 1871 an edition of King Alfred's translation of the Cura Pastoralis of Gregory the Great, in which he had laid the foundations of the dialectology of Old English. He had been familiar since 1868 with the system of A. Melville Bell's Visible Speech (1863), and this bore fruit in his Handbook of Phonetics: including a Popular Exposition of the Principles of Spelling Reform, published in 1877. His History of English Sounds from the earliest period had appeared in 1874; this is a work of great originality, and in its enlarged form (1888) became a standard text-book.

In 1876 Sweet published the first edition of his famous Anglo-Saxon Reader, a selection of Old English literature that has not been surpassed in any similar compass. In the twenty years following he produced most of that pioneer work which, by its range and originality, distinguishes him as the greatest philologist that this country has produced. In The Oldest English Texts (1885), the result of some seven years of the closest work, he put the early history of English once for all on a sound basis. Through the medium of his Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885) and the English edition of it (1890) he taught phonetics to Europe; he must, indeed, be considered to be the chief founder of modern phonetics, and his descriptions of the sounds of the languages examined by him—for instance, Danish, Welsh, Russian, and Portuguese—will always retain their value.

Sweet applied the data of human speech with vital results to the exposition of the history of the English language and to the elucidation of wider linguistic problems. Supreme examples of his method are seen in A New English Grammar (1892, 1898) 519