Antique European Oil Lamps

I recently gave a friend of mine a couple of Victorian era European oil lamps. I haven’t gone to the trouble of counting them, but I’ll bet that I probably have around seventy five or very likely well over a hundred antique European pre-electric light lamps.

Most are intended to operate on kerosene, although ten or fifteen are the Charles Pigeon style French lamps that use gasoline. And another ten or fifteen are turn of the century European bicycle lamps that operate on calcium carbide, like miner’s lamps. Water drips onto carbide which forms acetylene gas, which burns quite nicely.

This is a link to the different kinds of oil lamp burners and chimneys: http://paulgarland.blogspot.com/2006/07/oil-lamp-burners-and-chimneys.html

And this leads to some of my other oil lamps: http://paulgarland.blogspot.com/2006/08/high-victorian-era-european-oil-lamps.html

It was important to my friend’s wife that these lamps actually worked. I had to admit to him that although I have a wonderful and varied collection of antique lamps, I have never actually tried lighting any of these hundred or one hundred and fifty year old plus lamps. So today I tried lighting four of the oil lamps in my collection.

It really is quite a testament to these engineers in the late 1800’s that more than a century later it is possible to just add some oil and light up these lamps. Things manufactured in the Victorian Era generally are extremely well built, and also very beautiful and ornate.

It did make me a little nervous using these 100 year old wicks, but in three out of the four lamps I tried everything went fine.

On one of the round burner type lamps I made the mistake of turning it up to high fire before the glass chimney had sufficient time to heat up. And within less than a second the chimney shattered.

This may be a coincidence, but this particular lamp had a replacement glass chimney. The other three had original, hundred year old antique glass chimneys. Or maybe I just treated these other 3 more gently, and took my time before I went up to high fire.

One thing surprised me a little: The Kosmos round burner style does indeed generate a great deal more light than the flat burner. This I already knew intellectually but I hadn’t actually seen it with my own eyes.

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What I didn’t fully realize was just how much heat generation went along with this increase in flame/light. Good golly, the chimneys on these round burner type lamps get REALLY HOT!