Lamps in Flint Glass Collecting

Video Transcript

"Talking about flint and specifically about lighting, we see the bell flower pattern here in early lighting which was used extensively during the early, mid and late 1800's. And it came in alot of variety of forms. You have the whale oil; they would call a whale oil lamp, the smaller font - which is this part right here - which holds the liquid or fluid. So this is another variety with the waffle pattern stem and base. So, I'm just going to show you a few examples today. This is one here which is diamond and I'm not quite sure of the pattern but it's a really pretty pattern. And here we have another pattern which you can see the heart shaped pattern with the larger font holds a little more fuel but the same or basically similar pattern for the base. So these are two really nice examples that are made with flint. Here's another larger, similar base and pattern with the diamond cut. Much larger font holds alot more fluid. So there are five examples here. I'll show you one more. The font is very small, it has almost an Argus pattern, and it’s a circular pattern, a half moon. It has a brass collar here with a milk glass base which is really popular also. Small fluid reservoir. Most of these did not have these burners on. These earlier whale oils had burners with small center wicks - there were two center wicks that came out the front - with little caps that fit over the top. If you go to any of the reference books that we talked about like Ruth Webb Lee's book or you can go to early American glass books during the 19th century and they will show you a number of examples with the original burners on the tops. But in today’s case alot of people who want to use these can go to using these type of burners and they're just as effective. That's just a few examples of fluid lamps that were used when flint lamps were popular."