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.

THIS PAGE WAS CONTINUED FROM HERE
http://antiquesockets.com/lighting-timetable4.html

I prefer to call many of these styles "Chicago Lighting" since the lighting styles were not only manufactured there, but grew, expanded and became popular all over Chicago and it's suburbs and then all over the U.S.

In fact it is still possible today to find a stack of this type of old lighting in the corner of an old Chicago barn or basement of a building from when it was taken down or replaced.

Shown on your right is a pile of three flat 18 3/4" white opal shades that the owner did not even know were glass (because of the dirt) even after 40 years of looking at them. The areas that are showing through with white happened during moving, as these shades were totally black in color when found.

Next to these shades were stacked the original lighting fixtures to go with them (one shown on your left. (AS AN ADDED BONUS - next to these fixtures and shades, was also the old pre-1900 industrial fixtures that these had originally replaced).

Most times when you find these type of fixtures, they will either be Benjamin, Dale or Federal Electric Company items. Mostly because it was mainly these companies that flooded the market with these types of designs.

The 1909 Federal Electric fixture shown above, is also shown to your right after being cleaned and restored.

The Benjamin MFG. Co. Incorporated in 1901. They started in Chicago with their new line of wireless clusters early in 1902, and by 1905, they expanded their operation to New York and San Francisco. Benjamin was the forerunner of this new type of industrial lighting, which played a big part in causing industrial ARC lighting to become a thing of the past. ARC street lighting stayed around for a little over a decade, but stores, professional buildings and factories began moving towards this simple new type of reflective lighting.

As electrical codes changed and buildings needed to update their lighting, Benjamin was right on top of things with these new easy to install wireless clusters and fixtures. Benjamin had attracted many jobbers and contractors and word of mouth traveled fast. By 1905 Benjamin had many major contracts and supplied their clusters and reflectors to many major cities. With little competition in these early years (1902-1909), Benjamin moved forward and made it's dent in lighting history. An example of success would be a new building (shown on your left) that was being built in 1905 and was to be the tallest building in New York at the time (the Railroad & Iron Exchange Building), in which over 2000 Benjamin clusters were installed. Other New York contracts by 1905 included the Mercantile Building, Barclay Building, Times Building, Tabor Building, Trinity Building and the Hotel Breslin. In other cities: The Henery Siegel Building in Boston, The Henery Walker Building, The Monks Building and the John Hancock Building. Benjamin clusters even caught on for railway cars and depots and were contracted for the St. Louis Transit Company, Boston Railway, N.Y. Street Railway, Rapid Transit in N.Y, American Railway in PA, Washington Railway in D.C., West Side Railway in Chicago, Chicago Union Traction and Los Angeles Railway Co.. These are a few examples to show you that this was no small venture, Benjamin was a great success and went on for almost a decade without any real competition.

Before long the product designs of the lighting clusters and fixtures grew, as new Benjamin specialty parts were invented. As the more common lighting market started to grow, Benjamin also moved into the home lighting market to compete with Hubbell, Bryant and other electrical specialty manufacturers (but with less success).

By 1908/1909 other manufacturers such as Federal Electric Co. (Chicago) started making similar designs and began to compete on a large scale. By this time the lighting "style" was common and it was not the Benjamin name that people looked for, it was just the simple lighting style that was purchased.

Below are some pictures from catalogs of some of the wireless cluster styles.
They are called wireless clusters because only two wires are required to come down into the cluster. Once these two wires are connected, all of the sockets work and operate. Keeping in mind that other clusters of the time needed each socket to be wired separately costing much more time. Some clusters even required wires to be pushed through small curved tubes (Dales and others), The Hubbell cluster even required more work in that the early style of Hubbell socket shell required threading the pull chains as well. If a worker was installing a 16 light Dale style separable cluster ball (a six light version shown on your right) he would not only need to pull 16 wires down through the tubes, but he would need to also connect 16 costly sockets and connect the wires to them. Even a fast expert worker would take much time installing only one of these. For fun lets count the minutes as if the worker was in a race to get the job done. He cuts 16 wires to length, (two minutes), he strips both ends of the wires (two more minutes), he pulls each wire down through the tubes (another two minutes), he loosens the screws and removes the caps from 16 sockets and pulls out the insides (four minutes), he screws socket caps on to 16 tubes and then tightens the set screw on each (four minutes if he did not poke out any cap insulators), he ties the "wireman's knot" on each wire pair under the cap (four minutes) he connects each socket to the stripped wires or strips them at this stage (four minutes) he slides socket shells and insulators over the insides and secures each with two side screws (most sockets of this time) (four minutes) he ties all of the wires together and to the center wires and puts on the bottom cluster ball (4 minutes). Even though this has taken 30 minutes so far, it is not likely that anyone would had completed this task in less then 60 minutes per cluster. While it is true that much of this work would have been prepared off site, it still needed to be done. 100 clusters would take over four days for one person if he did not need to sleep. In contrast the Benjamin cluster would had been completed two minutes each (this style did not use collars) and 100 clusters taking a little over three hours to prepare.

With Benjamin's new wireless clusters, (a twenty light version shown on your left) the worker would only need to connect two wires to the top of the cluster opening which saved time and money on purchasing sockets, wire and future maintenance.


Here is a close look at a Benjamin Style K 6 Socket Cluster (shown to your right and below). It would also be good to note that there are multi socket clusters out there, that are larger socket clusters with smaller socket caps. These holes in these caps were stamped, so no real big deal to add the thread attachments and punch more holes in the cap. I have seen a 7 socket style K with only 4 sockets in use and a cap with only four holes. A cluster like that could easily be converted to its original design capacity of 7 sockets.


In the picture shown on your left, I have put white circles where the lead in wires would attach.

The two fixture wires would come up through the bottom back of the cluster and attach one to each screw. After being tightened, the cap would be replaced and the porcelain collars screwed over the Edison threads. It was these collars that held the cluster together or the cap in place.

All Benjamin clusters started out and were "ceiling form" clusters, meaning that each cluster had holes in the bottom of the porcelain and could be directly screwed into a ceiling using standard wood screws.

It was the after market parts in the early days that made the cluster able to be used as a Cluster Pendant Unit.

Since there were different size clusters, the flanges and flange part numbers were different for each style cluster.

The point here being, that you will frequently come across Benjamin clusters that are "ceiling form", meaning that there is no flange back to attach it to a fixture. However, this does not mean that it can not be used with a fixture. You only need to find the correct size back for it.

The Benjamin cluster shown on your right has a tapped 3/8 inch flange back plate attached.
It is also note worthy that many times you will find these back plates using reducers. Reducers were sometimes used to adapt the plate to a smaller size, which most times can be easily removed (with some WD40) if needed. Shown below is a capture from the 1905 Benjamin catalog that explains what I am talking about, which also shows the part numbers and pictures of pack plates for a Style 2 Benjamin Cluster.

It is not hard to see why Benjamin was such a success with this new lighting concept. I am personally surprised that there was not as much direct competition in the early days. Benjamin was smart in the way that they continued to quickly invent new items to deal with most any application that would be needed. This made them a kind of one stop shop for jobbers and secured their clients for decades to come.

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BENJAMIN - THE NEXT DECADE

Between 1905 and 1915 many new clusters, fixtures and inventive parts came out (some of which are shown below).

Benjamin made a wise move and did not fall into the mistake that I have seen so many other companies make.
During this time new clusters were developed, BUT they did not discontinue ANY of the already successful cluster styles. They continued making the older styles while adding and mixing the new lines into their existing inventory.

The only difference in the older clusters shown above is a small name change in "STYLE" numbers are now changed to "TYPE" numbers and the "Clusters" are now called "Cluster Bodies". For example a cluster already shown above called "Benjamin Style 2 Cluster" is now called "Benjamin Type 2 Cluster". The porcelain collars that screw on to the socket threads have changed some too, but that is another topic since these have changed many times through the years. I may research this later and provide a time line for different style porcelain collars. Also noted is that many of the new clusters invented no longer used collars. Also many of the insides of these new type clusters are no longer made with porcelain. These are now made of different materials of hard rubber, Bakelite and other synthetics (note that the older styles were still made with porcelain).

Only the new clusters and a few of the many new lighting fixtures are shown below. There are far too many new items to list here. For a more complete list you can purchase digital copies of the Benjamin catalogs from this site.

The most popular fixtures of the time were those using the large 18 inch flat opal shades like the fixture shown above and to your left.
This lighting style caught on and was manufactured and sold by other companies as well.

It also became the industrial common design for lighting large spaces. There are many in-use pictures from the period also of these designs in our picture database.

The fixture shown here is an example of a Benjamin three socket pendant cluster type T53. It came with options of 2,3,4 or 5 lights of which all versions came with an 18 inch flat opal reflector.

Another thing to take note of is that the "Pendant Clusters" are normally marked or stamped Benjamin, while the "Cluster Pendant Units" in most cases are not. This could be because the cluster itself is already marked or because Benjamin did not manufacture all of the fixture parts that they sold. In other words, the instance of a fixture being used together with a standard cluster body; the cluster is already marked (as all clusters were). But in the case of a "Pendant Cluster", it has a built in cluster (the fixture being the cluster) and the fixture itself is marked as shown above.

You will notice the close design between this cluster and the style of the 1909 Federal Electric cluster pendant shown above at the top of this Benjamin section on the web page.

This fixture is also shown below in the catalog pictures (the four socket version T-54). Benjamin had many designs of clusters for different uses. For example Industrial Clusters, Special Units, Wireless Cluster Units, Pendant Clusters, Cluster Pendant Units, Ceiling Units, Single Units, Waterproof Units, Cluster Street Lights, Street Hoods & Clusters, Single Unit Street Lights, etc.

Each of these go together with the type of cluster being used. For example: "Cluster Pendant Units" are those that use a standard cluster fit into a fixture body (shown below), while "Pendant Clusters" are fixtures like the one shown above where the cluster is part of the fixture and signed Benjamin.

In this example, we have a fixture with a Benjamin Style 7 (four socket cluster with a switch). The fixture itself is not signed, but the cluster is.
These fixtures with this hood style shown here were sold by Benjamin in their catalogs as a chain pendant and as shown here a pendant fixture. There were many different types of fixture parts that Benjamin used through the years. Sometimes it can be hard to tell if it was an item that Benjamin put together and listed in their catalog, or if it was something that a jobber put together from different fixture suppliers, using a Benjamin cluster.

Through the many years of Benjamin catalogs, it would use too much space to list all of the different fixture parts. If you plan on being a purest, you will need to purchase digital copies of the Benjamin catalogs from this site, or start collecting catalogs yourself and learning all of the different styles.

Another note though is that Benjamin did not directly manufacture all of the fixture parts that were sold in their catalogs.

It was common practice for manufacturers to purchase items at a discount from other specialty manufacturers.

The largest of these that I am aware of was the Faries Manufacturing Company. I will soon do a page on Faries because when done it will surely blow the mind of anyone that is familiar with different fixture styles. It is an awesome thing to see fixtures being sold in raw form. Meaning before the holes were punched and drilled, totally unfinished pieces waiting for the jobber or manufacturer to work their magic. This is what you would see with Faries as they sold thousands of turned, stamped and cast items, unfinished and hot off the press.

It would be a task in itself to identify every part, inventor and manufacturer. Some items were licensed and allowed to be made by one manufacturer when it belonged to yet another. Then in other cases it was not licensed, but sold at a discount to the other manufacturer. So items can be identified as being owned by one manufacturer, sold by another, but that does not mean that they manufactured it. Then another can of worms; Patents are another issue. After a patent had expired other manufacturers could consider the item open game to manufacturer and sell.




BENJAMIN - OTHER PARTS - SHADE HOLDERS - WIRE GUARDS




After 1905 there were MANY other wire guards, baskets, work lights, industrial fixtures, sockets, lamp clusters, etc., etc., the list really goes on and on and on. Sadly far too much to list here, so if you want to learn more about Benjamin products you will need to purchase our digital Benjamin catalogs.

ALSO, this page grew too much for me to add additional information about Dale clusters and the Chicago Federal Electric Company fixtures. So, added below are some quick captures showing some Dale clusters from 1908 and some Federal Electric fixtures from 1909.

This next section of the lighting timetable is under construction and will be linked here when complete.
Please check back later.

Latest New Page Finished was on Oct. 26th 1008
Last updated on Nov. 6th 2008: GECO Sockets
The history of G.E. Co. sockets, dating them and how to tell one from the other