The Amazing Angle Lamp

Loretta reports:

As well as going under the Mound House of Estero Island, I entered the house itself, which has been lovingly restored to one of its earlier incarnations. Indoors included an immense bathroom (from a later period), which holds some fascinating exhibits for both children and adults.

But what caught my Nerdy History Girl attention was the lamp in the restored living room. A guide told me it’s an Angle Lamp, and showed me an old advertisement for it. Turns out this was a well-known type of kerosene lamp, which was around for quite a long time, and whose advertisements appeared in numerous periodicals.

Many of us tend to assume that, as soon as a new lighting invention came along, the old ones went away. But of course not. Just as today, we don’t always have the latest model refrigerator, people in the past, for the most part, kept their stuff until it didn’t work anymore and couldn’t be fixed. I exclude, naturally, the people who always have to have the latest thing, because they were around too, needing the most up-to-date caves, I’ll bet.

Angle Lamp 1907 ad

With lighting, it’s not necessarily a matter of making things last, though this is part of the story. People continued to use older types of lighting because the newfangled inventions were either suspect, e.g., for safety reasons, or simply for practical reasons. Thus gas began lighting the streets of London long before it lit private houses. In between, it blew up some buildings. Electric utilities came into being in the early 1880s, but it was a while before they became ubiquitous. And it was another while before many people deemed electric light safe, healthy, and/or not hideous.

You can read more ads and some fascinating claims (e.g., white light causes blindness!) via these links
The Mayflower, Volume 20, Issues 10-12 1904
 
The Medical Brief 1899

Watson’s magazine Vol 6 (1906)

Floral Life Vol 5-6 (1907)
—and many more by simply Googling "Angle Lamp"

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American Monthly Review of Reviews Vol 36 (1907)

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