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Voltage- 110-120vWattage/rating- 16cp? Filament- Carbon, Double loop, anchored Cap type- Thomson-Houston, porcelain type Circa- 1900 Finish- Clear glass Origin- USA A small 2-loop carbon filament lamp made by GE and carrying a round label deep in the stem which bears the GE "Meatball" script logo. It has a few small but nasty looking scratches on the side as well as a small hairline crack however it still lights perfectly. Needless to say I handle this one extra-carefully! It is fitted with a white porcelain "Thomson-Houston" base- a type long since obsolete. T/H bases were constructed in 3 main styles, the earliest being a smooth sided turned-brass type. Slightly later ones were made of pressed brass and had grooves in the side too. The white porcelain ones were used around 1900, at the brief time porcelain was used as an insulating material in many lamp bases. Most earlier lamps user plaster insulation (including the brass T/H types) and later lamps used cheaper to produce black-glass but by then, T/H bases were probably not produced any more (although I am unsure as to the exact dates they were used- please feel free to correct me if I`m wrong). All 3 styles of the T/H bases use the same contact method. A threaded central hole provides one contact and serves to screw the lamp in place on to a threaded peg in the socket, and a co-axial ring surrounding the centre acts as the second contact.  Lamps with Thomson Houston bases are very desirable to collectors since they are quite scarce, even though they are about the most "common" of the old obsolete base types used on early lamps. It is not hard for collectors to find T/H based lamps on places like Ebay. The sockets they fit into are often much more valuable than the bulbs since fewer were produced- the reason being that lamps burned out and were replaced however the socket stayed put. The socket used to hold the lamp in the picture on the left is a home-made one I built since at the time I didn`t have a genuine one! |
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