Over a hundred years ago, the big innovation in vehicular lighting was its very existence. Gas-flame headlamps, they were, fuelled by acetylene created en route by drizzling water on canned calcium carbide, then piped to the headlamps.
With these new devices, motorists could venture forth on the primitive, hazard-fraught, sparsely-populated roads after dark. This article called “Midnight Motoring”, from the October 1907 issue of ‘American Country Life’ magazine, waxes poetic—at times rhapsodic—about the pleasures and astonishments of driving at night. Click to get the full article as a PDF:
Look at the description of the new acetylene headlamps, which are said to produce a bright, white light—sound familiar?—versus the previous oil-wick lights which burned with a wan, yellow flame capable only of (barely) advertising the equipped vehicle’s presence, not of lighting the driver’s way.
These first real headlamps were full-time high beams; upon meeting another driver (of motorcar or horse), the expectation was to throw a towel over at least the offside lamp or, on the fancier installations, operate a lever that would physically tilt the lamps downward or outward. These were the foundational steps toward our (where our means everyone in the whole wide world except the United States) present luxurious position of intelligent glare-free high beams of bright white LED or laser light coming from headlamps that look like sculptured jewellery and consume only a dozen watts or so apiece. It’s a hell of a thing to reflect—or project—on the immense progress made in the 114 intervening years between when it was written and when you are reading it.
I’ve appended a related article to the PDF, “Suggestions on Automobile Driving”, from the same magazine. About half this second article is devoted to the proper use and (extensive) maintenance of the new acetylene headlamps. Almost everyone knows how distressing it is to be suddenly blinded (…) by the glare of an acetylene headlight, and how difficult it is to keep cool and do the right thing if the car carrying the light is moving fast and there are other vehicles, it says—this, too, sounds familiar to us in 2021; that situation still exists, only without the acetylene. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
This is fascinating, and made me look some things up. This article apparently involved the “early” system where the gas was made on the go with a hunk of calcium carbide and dripping water. A few miles away from my house the “perfected” system was invented and manufactured by the Prest O Lite company. Prest O Lite eliminated the finicky “Mr. Fusion” style on-board reactor and replaced it with refillable tanks full of acetylene that you could swap out when empty.
Prest O Lite technology marked the beginning of refillable cylinders for gasses of all kinds and was part of the formation of Union Carbide a number of years after your featured article was written.
Prest O Lite was the company that made Carl Fisher and James Allison rich, and therefore able to build this little race track some of you may have heard of (called the Indianapolis Motor Speedway).
I have a similar experience (albeit less poetic) driving with the top down in my SLK at night, which is one of my favorite things to do.
Without the sun beating on you, you are free to take in the full sensory delight of open motoring. I can dispense with the hat, sunscreen, and other forms of sun protection I must don during the day and feel the breeze through my hair. It seems weird, but your other senses really become more acute after dark.
You can feel the rapid microclimate changes as you go up and down hills and valleys. You can enjoy the gentle warmth from the various heating devices rather than having to blast the A/C to make a little bit of a cool breeze.
For the self-conscious, driving with the top down after dark leaves you free to observe without constantly being on display. If you are lucky enough to live away from light pollution like I am, your passenger can enjoy star gazing while riding in the car.
I haven’t tried starting a fire on a stranger’s property, but I’ve found the gentle glow of the interior illumination to be a good substitute.
As an aside, the industrial gas business still uses a size of acetylene cylinder known as a “B” cylinder. The “B” came from its original use, which was to provide lighting in buses… back in the day.
The smallest size of compressed gas cylinders is still called the MC cylinder in north America. They were intended for mounting on a Motor Cycle frame.
Interesting to reflect on the changes a century or so has brought. It is bit strange to not be
Reading one of your COAL this morning Daniel. I have a lighting question I would like to
Pose to you, what would be the best way to do that?
May I suggest merely posting your question on this thread?
Oh, please don’t, unless it’s a question relevant to this CC post.
That was my initial thought, but did not want to go that far off topic, muddying
the waters so to speak.
Email is best. I’m easy to find; just search Daniel Stern Lighting .
The lighting system was the same setup as the old lighthouse acetylene generators on oxy acetylene welding sets the predate bottle gas of that variety and probably make 6v VW lights look good.
It’s also the same way that acetylene gas is created in those “Big Bang Cannons” many of us had as kids — except there one dumped a small scoop of the calcium carbide powder into a water reservoir. Add a spark from a little flint and you got the bang — which leads to the question of how the auto lamps generated a flame rather than an explosion.
The gas was metered through orifices, and not allowed to accumulate before it was ignited. You could attain a (possibly destructive) bang by letting the gas flow into a closed headlamp, then lighting it with the door/lens closed.
They don’t write like that any more! Or maybe I’m just not reading the ‘right’ magazines.
Just last night I was reading an old novel (I do that a lot) set around 1905, which gave a very graphic description of two young couples returning from a lovely day’s picnic in their new surrey when their horse was spooked by an oncoming auto. Despite getting out to hold the horse’s head, it still took off with fright, and the guy holding it got thrown. Fortunately the injury was restricted to concussion, and a broken shaft on the surrey. It all seemed very realistic, as though the author was writing of something she’d experienced. But she described the oncoming car as ‘two red eyes’. That’s poetic licence, I’m thinking; from what’s written here carbide lamps wouldn’t have looked red, surely? Kerosene wouldn’t have burned red, either.
My oldest automobile was a 1914 Buick B-25 4 cylinder open tourer. It was equipped with the drip type gas generator for the headlights only. A few years later it had factory update to a magneto and battery, and the headlights modified to also contain the electric bulbs. The rear lamp was also electrified and a starter motor added.
I had the car in 1978 to 1979 and only drove the car a few times after dark. This was a car that had been fully restored in the late 1960s and operated as it did when new. That meant at speeds over 25mph, it was a scary situation. It’s brakes were externally expanding on the rear wheels alone, and as I recall the brake bands were leather and only about 1″ wide.
So a maximum safe speed was 10 to 12 mph. I mention this because using either the electric or the gas lighting, driving faster than that on a rural road without the benefit of other nearby lighting was not a good idea, as it was difficult to see more than 30 feet ahead. The combination of poor lighting and brakes was the reason behind me selling the car.
I kept a battery operated rotating yellow warning lamp in my tool case on the rear floor. It had a magnetic base, and if I had to drive it at night I would take the light out and place it on the top of the left front fender and turn it on. Also had several high powered flashlites to light up the road ahead.
Great article. Needs an asterisk though. * except if your name is Joe Lucas. Joe seemed to think that a gentleman did not motor about after dark.
Back in the late 1970s I ran a large shop specializing in older Brit sports cars. I published a short pamphlet on Lucas jokes. In the inside cover I reminded readers that the booklet was best read during daylight hours!
I also take credit for the 1979 vinyl bumper sticker displaying the British flag with the words “All parts falling off this car, are of the finest British workmanship”.
Funny stuff, though Lucas did a lot of really terrific lighting R&D work in the ’70s-’80s, and commercialised a fair amount of the resultant technology.
I believe most of the Lucas jokes can be traced back to the pre-WW2 designs where the wire connections to various vehicle lamp assemblies [like taillight and license plate lamps] involved sticking a trimmed wire end into a spring loaded copper coated connector. To attach the wire you pressed down on one part of the connector and inserted the bare copper wire. Releasing the pressure caused the wire to be held in place.
These connections were exposed to the air. As they are copper or copper coated they corroded, especially in the humid east coast of the US. These lamps and connector design continued well into the 1970s.
n the late 1970s I was part of the new quality Triumph TR2 thru TR6 and the MGA wiring harness designs, and the sourcing of all the reproduction wiring harnesses. We had the harnesses built with crimped-on bullet ends instead of the bare wire ends. Many of the repro vehicle lights have spade lugs or female plug ends to accept the bullet wire ends.
Oh, gawd, yes, don’t mistake me; there was a lot of WTF-level slack engineering from Lucas, and a baffling amount of it was kept in widespread use for a staggering amount of time after it had demonstrated its unworthiness. Hence the likes of this picture and this page.
Wow, thanks for the info on the Lucas smoke kit. Sure could have used these when I ran my restoration shop. And I always wondered why Elkins, WV had so many damn British cars!
Indeed, the debate over the superiority of these headlamps over the yellowish hue of their predecessors sounds familiar, 114 years later.
One wonders if drivers with oil-wick lights took to writing to the local newspaper to bitch about the glare from cars equipped with the acetylene ones, much as they do in social media today.
I’ve already written here that my grandparents and friends drove a caravan of Buicks from Flint to NC during WW I. Once they had to wait until the dirt road froze after dark, and they were open phaetons with just curtains on the side. I hadn’t thought about the relatively dim headlights of the period and the dearth of street lights, but people then were more used to getting around by moonlight than we are. Still, not surprising my grandmother remembered the trip 70 years later.
I think this is the first time I’ve read an article from this time period that extols the virtues of night driving. Most other accounts that I’ve taken in have either written it as a necessary evil at best, and better avoided. Though I only saw cars from about 1955-forward as being desirable, my fascination with early motoring has grown immensely in the last 15 years or so.
As I mentioned in Daniel Stern’s other piece that features the Model T the pictured headlamp belongs to, I have been fortunate enough to have a wee bit of experience working on, and a little bit of seat time in a couple of brass era cars, but have never been allowed to venture out after dark in any of them. A museum that I worked at has a 1910 Franklin that I would have been an excellent conveyance to take in a beautiful summer night in Tucson. It is actually equipped with the B size compressed acetylene tank, so no carbide and water mess, thank you! …but still imagine the extra steps involved in preparing for a night drive- Two cowl lamps and one tail lamp that need kerosene, matches, and wicks adjusted. Then turning on the acetylene and dashing to the front of the car with more matches. Then extinguishing all five lamps once you’ve reached your destination. Also a possibility of needing to dismount to check lamps, refuel, or adjust wicks on a longer drive.
Another thing worthy of note: Blue tinted headlamp bulbs aren’t just a recent misfortune… there is a 1916 or 1917 Franklin at the same museum that has very blue bulbs in its headlights. I’m sure the marketing heave on those read very much like what you see today. Those are the only blue bulbs I’ve seen from the pre-sealed beam era, but that one pair affirms that they *do* exist. Might have to pop in and catch a photograph of those, as I don’t seem to have any on file.
Here y’go!
Oh snap!
Sure ’nuff, the “marketese” hasn’t advanced much in the last 100 years! The bulbs on said car look even bluer than those in the Tung-Sol ad… about the same shade as blue tinted camera flashbulbs.
Here’s another period accessory one of the museum cars possesses: A red tail with a blue-green brake lamp (photo borrowed from expired eBay ad).
For 40+ years I sold NOS antique car parts at the big Carlisle and Hershey flea markets. Over the years I’ve had boxes from various manufacturers of pre-1939 headlight bulbs that had a blue tint to the glass. The typical advertising on these 10-count cases of bulbs, suggested the blue tint improved night time driving. I also bought & sold car parts at the Beaulieu Autojumble in England where I saw similar bulbs, so it’s not just a USA thing.
I’m curator to a few vehicle accessory oddities.
Of course the usual “STOP” “CAUTION” etc. lenses. Yawn
One piece is aftermarket column-mounted self-cancelling turn signal switch #1. The canceling works via some ingenious simple-stupid mechanism. Now, I haven’t looked at in so long I can’t recall exactly what the mechanism is. lol
Suction cup that bleeds off? Something dumb like that.
The Lucas turn signal lever was a clockwork mechanism that when the lever was moved in the desired direction, the clockwork took a couple of minutes to “unwind” and turn the switch off. Back when a driver rarely had to wait long to make a turn into oncoming traffic lanes, this was OK, but as wait times got longer [as at a traffic light], it meant you had to repeatedly move the lever again. The simple design allowed the switch to be attached almost anywhere, and was usually screwed to the dashboard
The Guide company [division of GM] in the USA, invented a universal self-canceling turn signal. This was when the lever assembly [a small metal box] could be mounted to a metal steering wheel column with a steering wheel having a round base. The turn signal assembly had a small metal wheel with a rubber “tire” at the outer edge. When the lever was moved, this “tire” was pushed against the steering wheel’s base area, and when the steering wheel was turned, the wheel kicked off the turn signal lever. See photo.