[Illustration: uncaptioned]
In 1859, drillers in Pennsylvania brought in the nation’s first
producing oil well, an event that was to alter radically the lives of
generations of Americans. The first revolution achieved by this
versatile new fuel was not in mechanical power, but in lighting. A
working oil field made possible the manufacture of kerosene, a promising
coal and petroleum-based illuminant that had been patented in New York
in 1854 but had not been put into production because of the scarcity of
one of its principal ingredients. Kerosene burned more brightly,
steadily, and efficiently than almost any known fuel except gas, which
suffered from the twin disadvantages of requiring immovable fixtures in
the wall or ceiling, and of being generally unavailable outside large
urban areas. The abundance of petroleum from the Pennsylvania fields
made kerosene one of the cheapest fuels available, and by the mid-1860s,
its use had far outstripped that of gas lighting. In many rural areas,
it remained the only practical form of household lighting until
electrification of these areas in the 1930s.
[Illustration: Figure 26. Student lamp chimney. This glass was used
in reading lamps like those illustrated in Figure 27. The
kerosene-fueled student lamp was an 1863 Prussian design that became
popular in the United States in the 1870s.]
Early kerosene lamps often resembled the oil lamps of the first half of
the century, and many were oil lamps converted to kerosene. Among the
new designs that became popular in the 1870s was the adjustable student
or reading lamp (Figs. 26 and 27), an 1863 Prussian invention used
through the early twentieth century. In the 1880s decorated lamp
chimneys came into fashion. One of the earliest, simplest, and most
enduring of these styles was the familiar “pearl top” chimney rim,
patented by the George A. Macbeth Company in 1883 (Fig. 28). Similar
crimped rims were produced by the Thomas Evans Company, which in 1899
merged with Macbeth to become, by virtue of a semiautomatic lamp chimney
machine, the nation’s largest glass chimney manufacturer. Demand for
glass lamp chimneys was curtailed by the spread of electric power in the
early twentieth century, and, although it continued in production, the
lamp chimney industry did not fully mechanize until after the 1920s.
[Illustration: Figure 27. Kerosene student and piano lamp,
reproduced from 1895 and 1907 department store catalogues.]
[Illustration: Figure 28. “Pearl top” and crimped lamp chimneys. The
true pearl top rim on the far left was patented by the George A.
Macbeth Co. in 1883. The variations shown on the right became
popular about the same time.]