Carbide Light: The Last Flame in American Mines

Carbide Light traces the history of the numerous inventors and manufacturers of carbide lamps and offers exhaustive, full-color documentation of this fascinating corner of American history. Author Dave Thorpe describes the technical features of the numerous styles of lamps, from the earliest Baldwin lights that began to appear around 1900 to the extensive line of Justrite lamps that were still made in the 1970s. He also includes biographies of the inventors who patented the lamps, bringing human drama to this engineering topic. During carbide's short reign as the predominant form of mine lighting (1910 to 1925) hundreds of novel designs appeared and form a chronological record in the pages of this volume.