The Lighting Time Table

To read the entire tutorial, you can just click on the first link and then continue to the next section at the bottom of each page. Or, you can select links below of interest to you.

PRE 1900 SECTION

Overcoming Obstacles
About Early Electric Lighting, Generators, Arc Lamps, The First Edison Socket, Menlo Park, etc.
The First Fixtures
About The Start Of The First Incandescent Lighting Fixtures
Light Reflection
About Early Light Bulbs And Candle Power vs. WATTS
Edison-Bergmann
About Sigmund Bergmann And The Start Of Bergmann And Company Lighting Fixtures
Lighting Break Down
A Quick Break Down Of Different Lighting Time Periods
Styles 1881 to 1884
Bergmann Fixtures And Styles
Other Pre-1888 Styles
About Early Companies That Sold Lighting Systems And The Fixtures That They Sold With Their Lighting Systems
The U.S. Elect. Co.
The United States Electric Company History And Early Items
The Brush Elect. Co.
The Brush Electric Company History And Early Items
Thomson-Houston
The Thomson-Houston Electric Company History And Early Items
Westinghouse
About The Westinghouse Manufacturing Company History And Early Mergers
Mid 1880's Styles
About The Start Of Electrical Supply Houses and how new lighting styles came about
Pre 1900 Sockets
About Early Light Sockets And How To Tell The Difference
1887 New Items
1888 New Items
1890 New Items
1891 New Items
1892 New Items
1893 New Items
1894-1896 Items
1897 New Items
1898 New Items
1899 New Items
Above are catalog items sold in different years. There is no space to duplicate items, so only new and unique items from each year are shown. You would need to view the catalogs for yourself to be complete as I am only highlighting items. You can view catalogs here.

EXTRA INFO
Victor Shade Holder
About The Victor Shade Holder, Atwood And The Standard Holder

I.P. Frink 1899 Items
About Frink & Wheeler
New Wheeler Inverted
Three Links About Mirror Reflector Manufacturers And Their Items And History.
Wheeler Reflector Co.
NEW - A history of The Wheeler Reflector Company and tips on how to tell if mirror has been replaced on a shade

Early Desk Lamps
Some Help In Telling Them Apart

Vitrite And Luminoid
About The Vitrite Holders And Early Vitrite History

Brush-Swan Holder
About Brush-Swan Shade Holders

Cord Balls
My cord pendant adjuster project, as well as a good history about them.

POST 1900 SECTION

About 1900 Styles
This section covers a basic into into the 1900 section covering information about the 1899 transition, electrical code changes, lighting influence, sharing and licensing of patents and then into the new section of electrical specialty manufacturers,

Electrical Specialty Manufacturers
Harvey Hubbell
This section covers some early history periods of pre Hubbell-Grier, Hubbell-Grier, Harvey Hubbell, Hubbell Company. It also covers a number of items that helped change lighting styles,

Benjamin
This section covers some early history periods for the Benjamin Electric MFG. Co, as well as a small section on Dale and The Federal Electric Company
Dale
Federal Electric

This post 1900 section continues to be under current construction

Please Check Back.

FILE FORMAT OF CATALOGS
Most all catalogs are scanned in high resolution (300 dpi) and then assembled into Adobe Acrobat PDF files.
You can use Acrobat to save individual high resolution jpg or tiff files if needed.

To keep file sizes down, most catalogs are scanned using gray scale unless the catalog itself has color pages.
In cases where catalogs have mostly gray pages, we scan the catalog in gray scale and the color pages in color.
In cases where the catalog has mostly color pages, we scan the entire catalog in color.

QUALITY OF CATALOGS
Most catalogs are scanned from original catalog copies. Some catalogs that were originally in large format, needed to be shrunk down (copied using copy reduction) and then scanned from the copy. Other catalog sources (where the original was not available) have been scanned from gray scale photo copies. In either case, these high resolution scans produce excellent viewing PDF files, which is always much better then viewing the original catalog or copy.

Most catalogs are scanned and processed by us. There are however rare cases where we get a PDF from another source. In cases where the original PDF was not ours, we look at the quality of the PDF. If it does not pass our quality checks, we re process and re assemble it. Every page is looked at, cropped and rotated if needed as well as page size matching.

CATALOG PRICES
While I would love to give everything away for free, this just can not be done as there are many expenses that need to be covered. These expenses include (but are not limited to) buying catalogs, processing catalogs, hosting the archive, Internet bandwidth charges, programmer fees, etc. While this site is still a hobby for me, I have much more into it, then I could ever hope to get out of it. For example; A rare catalog that I had waited to find for many years cost me almost 2,000.00 when finally found in a private collection. Selling copies of this catalog at 50.00 each, would mean that I would need to sell 40 copies to support the purchase which is not likely to happen any time soon. Normal every day catalog purchases average from 100.00 to 300.00 and the more rare harder to find catalogs from 300.00 to 1000.00. Then there is the time that it takes to scan and process each catalog. I use a special book scanner which helps to limit time, but it can still take a total of about 4 or 5 hours to scan, crop and rotate an 80 page catalog.
A catalog over 300 pages is an all day job. While I will always try to keep prices down on this site, I need to consider what I have into this project. There are catalogs that I have purchased "copies" of myself for several hundred dollars each, which I considered the research value. I however, can not lower myself to the level of "profiteering" when this information is publicly needed for research. It is my goal to keep copy prices down as low as I can offer them taking into consideration the rarity, and work into each item.

This area has been disabled - I will bring something back for these options at a later date

Feel free to contact me - 603-978-0020 -- Michael