what is it
Any idea what this rather odd light fixture might have been for? I believe it is a converted gas lamp. But it looks too crude to be residential.
Any idea what this rather odd light fixture might have been for? I believe it is a converted gas lamp. But it looks too crude to be residential.
This is a very odd looking fixture. Could it be a standard two-arm gas fixture to which someone later added a Mission style shade? I’d have to see the inside.
Hmmm. Live and learn. I’ve never heard of the two in combination before, but as this excerpt from Rejuvenation Hardware indicates, not that uncommon.
“In the early 1900s, gas and electric interests fought tooth and nail for the lighting market.
As gas was cheap but imperfect, and electricity clean but sometimes unreliable, many folks hedged their bets with Gas/Electric lighting like the Mock’s Crest and Astoria – newfangled “combination” fixtures which used both technologies.
Instead of being caught in the middle, the fixture-buying public won out with a creative marriage of old and new technology, proving that you can have it both ways.”
I think it’s a combination gas/electric fixture. The two outside fixtures look like”gas candles”. It also might be all gas; on the bottom-right of the photograph there’s something that might be a gas pipe bending upwards toward the inside of the slag glass shade. The opening in the center of that shade might be sufficient to vent the heat from a gas jet.
It’s hard to be sure without seeing it in person, or at least a picture of the top, but the center section probably would not have been gas. There would have to be an opening of some kind to vent the exhaust gases and it looks solid. One of three things. One is that it’s just an electric fixture. Things don’t change that rapidly and a lot of the early electric fixtures shared similarities with gas fixtures. Although it does look like one of the side lights has a valve handle which would certainly indicated gas. Another possibility is that someone took some old gas fixtures and cobbled them together with something a little newer, which was fairly common. The last option is that I’m completely wrong on both counts and it started life complete, as is, and was converted to electricity down the road. Either way, it’s still a nice fixture. I don’t think it’s too crude to be residential, it would fit right in in many early 20th century homes.