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.
Figure 27. Kerosene student and piano lamp, reproduced from 1895 and 1907 department store catalogues.
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.
LABORATORY GLASS
[Figure 29] is a laboratory beaker of a type manufactured in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, probably a relic of William and Susan Middleton’s inventor son Henry. It is free-blown in lead glass, one of many glass compositions used for American laboratory equipment before Corning Glass Works introduced low-expansion Pyrex glass in 1915.
Figure 29. Free-blown laboratory beaker, probably late 19th or early 20th century.
Henry lived at Middleton Place with his parents until the 1870s, when he went to study at Cambridge University under the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Henry lived in England until his death in 1932.