Hey! We found what “forced my lute” meant! Back in ye olde chemistry days, lute was a substance used to make seals between your various chemistry apparatus. So, Clayton was probably saying the 330 year old equivalent of “blew the seals” (or indeed, the pressure was sufficient to break the glass!). Oh, and somehow I missed pointing out when the Aladdin lamp was first produced. The trademark was obtained in 1908 and the first lamps went on sale in 1909. Also of note, one source claims lamps made after 1935 were technically side-draft designs, meaning air doesn’t actually travel through the center of the wick. So “central draft burner” as used in my script here might be considered a misnomer.
Lute, In Chemistry: it is a liquid clay or cement used to seal a joint, coat a crucible, or protect a graft. As for "protect a graft", again, in chemistry, it is referring to something like a long, thin, glass tube inserted through a hole made in the side of large glass beaker; the graft being that 'connection'. Whereas, again in chemistry, a "joint" is specifically where two ends are 'joined' together. Thus, the phrase, "...forced my lute", means that it broke through material that sealed and connected the 2-piece glass made item together.
Yeah, the problem with that is when the counter does not return to zero by the end of the video it is visible to all. The way it is now, he has some plausible deniability to say "oops, I forget about xxx" in the comments or another video.
As a young boy in rural Philippines, I enjoyed watching my father light our Petromax lantern that had a mantle. I still remember my elation whenever the mantle would suddenly burst into brightness as it got heated and immediately flooded our dark living room with an intense light. Yes, whenever the mantle needed replacing, he would buy one from the town hardware and the new mantle would seem to me like a sock that he would fit over the lamp's burner. I did not quite understand how it worked then and I was just fascinated by it. I brings me happiness, now as old man, to remember these things.
@@Aztesticals Yes, a lot of spectacular events in my lifetime: the first landing on the moon, the first successful heart transplant, the invention of the cellphone and its progress into the smart phone, the internet and how it has made exchange and acquisition of communication so much easier , among other things. When I was young, same sex relations were frowned upon, today it is touted as part of basic human rights. A lot of change, indeed has happened in the world within my lifetime, and yes I am continuously fascinated by it all. Thank you. And yes, (and here, judging by your comment) I am assuming that you are of the much younger generation) you shall see a lot of "change" I am sure one of which shall be the first landing on Mars. Oh, I envy you for by then I shall be dust.
@@herminigildojakosalem8664 hey don't say that last part. Earliest estimates are within 9-12 years in the Artemis gets the public interested again enough for the fed in the usa to give nasa the funds. You made it this far hold strong and hope. I might not be very religious but il find a prayer tonight to hope you live to see it. It's my dream to see that as well and to be able to go to space one day. Jot as an astronaut but as a tourist.. hopefully by my 50s since I'm 23 now they will have made space hotels and all.
@@Aztesticals You are so young. You have all the time in the world. 9 -12 years? I would be so blessed if I make that. BTW I am now 65 years old, having been born in 1957 and beset with all the ails that come with the age (hypertension, diabetes, vertigo, etc) he-he (hu-hu-hu)
@@herminigildojakosalem8664 thanks and hey I've had a 108 yo great great aunt. A 101 yo great uncle, 97 yo great grandma, and a good few other family memebers live into their early 90s, late 80s. And our family has a history of high blood pressure and diabetes. And medicine is getting to the point that it actually scares me. But either way I hope you enjoy every last day you got. And let's hope for some incredible things to see in the next 5 years.
“It forced my lute.” When devices were made that had pipes or other attachments added to them which need to be made air tight or pressure resistant, a paste of some sort was prepare and applied to the joint. This paste was referred to as “luting.” Moonshiners used a paste of barley or rye flour mixed with water.
Sounds plausible. This means that 'forcing the lute' and 'breaking my glasses' might imply that pressure was building up in the destillation apparatus. The pressurized/quickly expanding gas either forced the joints to leak or simply bust the glass equipment.
My 92-year-old mother who grew up without electricity knows all about these lamps. Matter of fact there was one left in The Farmhouse and when we had a power failure amazed how much light it puts out
Hard to believe we've gone from burning fuel for light to color-changing wi-fi enabled LED smart bulbs in a single person's lifetime. What's even crazier is that we already take our modern lighting for granted.
@@methos1999 ....well technically fuel is still burnt to generate electricity to power led bulbs & other appliances. Today World industry is just trying to cut off the fuel usage by turning everything to electrification.
@@methos1999 The gap in technology is I assume exaggerated by their rural upbringing. Some notable events of 1931 include the completion of the Empire State Building, the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean, and the invention of the particle accelerator.
I'm a landlord in the UK and occasionally I come across the lead pipes used to feed gas matles from well over 100 years ago still buried in the walls of the houses.
People still use the Alladin lamps on remote ranches and mining claims especially at high altitude because it gets too cold for propane to work, and they don't have or can't start a generator. An alcohol or kerosene stove or heater will also still work at very low temperatures.
ISTR it wasn't always easy to remove a soot spot, it could take a while fiddling with the wick to burn it off because too low and there wasn't enough heat to get it glowing, but turn it up a fraction too high and you'd see the yellow flame licking up the outside of the mantle. I still have an Aladdin of the type we used in the 1970s, but haven't yet had a use for it, Kerosene OTOH is a useful degreaser, I usually have some handy.
@@grumpus27 have you tried Coleman $1 socks retrofitted to the Aladdin? I went to order new mantles last year and was just shocked ($38 for one). Went to the hardware store, bought a pack of two Coleman aftermarket soft mantles for 2.25. Tied one to the harp base and ring. Sprayed it with my wife's AquaNet till it was stiff and the right shape. Works fine.
@@MrBilld75 Come to think of it, it looked similar to the disintegration effects I've seen recently catching up on the Marvel shows. Or rather, Marvel have captured that disintegration effect wonderfully in their CGI.
As a hard of hearing / deaf person, I really appreciate that you always make sure that your videos have captions. I'm a fellow engineer and I love it when you release new content, even if I already know about it. I've been meaning to post that comment for a while, but figured I would do it on this video that you just released and it already has captions. Thank you!
@@AnonymaxUK As a non-native speaker myself I'm sometimes getting lost when people talk too fast. Unfortuatelly automatically generated subtitles usually derail at the same time, so unless author ads proper ones, parts of the video stay incomprehensible
@@windy916 Auto-generated only works 85% well if the script is good (to give proper context so words that have different meanings will translate properly) and the audio is crystal clear. My wife prefers the English auto-generated ones because the translations of them just add to the confusion. Scripted captions are amazing, and I think there's many TH-camrs who gain an audience purely because of them.
Even the term "Strumpflampe" "Stocking Lantern" was quite common. My Grandmother used it often to distinguish between gas mantle lanterns and (standard) "Petroleumlampe" (flat-wick kerosene lamp). And the "Petromax", which burns pressurized (with a hand pump) kerosene within the gas mantle is legendary ...
Please heed the safety instructions! The lamps must be monitored during use. DO NOT light and walk away, as the flame increases as the lamp heats. I did this once, lit, turned flame very low, got distracted, smoke alarms went off and red flame was roaring out the top of the chimney. The lamps are still used in rural areas, by the Amish, they tell me, and mantles, wicks and burner parts are sold in one local hardware. I collect them, they're fun to tinker with, a pain to trim the wicks, but fun to just turn off the lights and watch the lamp run.
I was raised with aladdin lamps, only 65 years old, we built home made diesel lamps for using while milking cows. My neighbour still doesnt have electric, his mother in her hundreds has moved to a house with electric but she was carrying coal buckets at 99, she couldnt start the generator so had to wait till her son got home, the generator would only run for a while at night. ( We installed electric in several farms when i was young). (In Scotland).
Norma,I am wondering if the old style Aladdin lamp idea with an incandescent mantle could be adapted to a mantle lamp that uses Bio Ethanol for fuel rather than Kerosene/Paraffin. Ethanol burns much hotter than Methanol and carries far less toxicity issues with its use. As far as wicks for burning Bio Ethanol are concerned I already use homemade wire filament wicks in small bottle type burners. I think there may be some worthwhile experiments in adding an incandescent mantle.
@@windyfarmer.6095 I never had them as a kid but when I started going to rural areas in the 70's all the types were very common, flat, Dietz and Alladin and the Coleman types. I still have examples of all of them at the ready for the inevitable power failure and the occasional evening just for ambiance.
"lute" means something like putty or cement... So I would interpret "forced my lute" as "It broke the seals on my still" (so pressure was building, becuase a gas originates from the heated coal and this gas could not be condensed, as the guy wrote before)... And it "broke my glass", so after he enforced the seals, the glass broke, because it couldn't hold the pressure...
I'll never forget the first time I went camping in the 90s, and my dad lit up a Coleman lantern. Damn near blinded me, and he said the trick is to set it up in a direction you don't need to look. We'd toss a rope over a sturdy tree branch, hoist the lantern up to about 8 feet off the ground, and tie off the line. It was like having a shop light in the woods!
@@no_peace quite frankly a light that bright would likely scare away anyone or anything because a human would probably come to the conclusion that if there is a light of such intensity the human that created it is probably still awake and an animal would see such a light and go I have no idea what's going on I don't want to know because I'll probably die if I find out I'm going to go the other way.
The Coleman fabric mits reminds me of my childhood. Going camping using the propane lamp. I can still remember the hissing sound and bright light. The moths and other insects buzzing. The smell of the campfire.
"Lute" can be defined as "a clay or cement used for sealing a joint or coating a crucible." So, I imagine, in this case, "forced my lute" might mean the gas cracked the cement he used to attempt to seal the gas inside a container? Maybe indicating that the gas was under a lot of pressure somehow? Just a guess...
That's most likely what he meant. The distillation of coal has to be done in an air tight vessel, such as when they made town gas or coke or when burning wood to make charcoal.
The author was quite likely precisely describing what physically happened, but we are so used to these old-timey mechanical phrases being used for dramatic flair it is hard to hear it that way. Imagine an electrician working on a circuit and saying he blew his fuse; he would probably be talking about the actual fuse in his system.
This was my guess also. If you look at the retort, there is a hole in top to fit a stopper or additional fixtures. "Forced my lute or broke my glasses" sounds like, "popped my cork or shattered my retort."
I love how the stock footage of the guy writing with a feather quill is so obviously *NOT* someone who actually knows how to write with one. All the text on the page when the clip begins is clean and precise - his writing is full of blotches and thick drops. :-D
I was like "damn this video is long" when suddenly the sentence came "we'll talk about this in the next video". Shows how well his content is produced.
@@BurkenProductions Erm, what? ......... My content was supposed to say, that the length of the video just flew by, because those were some entertaining 30 minutes.
I was blown away 20-30 years ago, taking the family camping, I picked up a Coleman propane lantern and had to figure out how to tie those little mesh bags onto the pipes. I could not believe how bright that thing lit up and never understood it. It was so amazing, it's stuck in my memory to this day. Finally, today watching your video I get it. Kind of. Thanks!
ain't yet watched entire video... Those mantles represent the first commercial use of rare earth elements/lanthanides . A number of the rare earth elements glow brightly at reasonably achieved temperature. Cerium and thorium especially I remember. Thorium was the best performer and no longer used today . A fresh mantle is a cloth impregnated with nitrates of the rare earths and a silicon based chemical perhaps ammonium silicate. After commissioning by burning the installed mantle in situ, the ammonium and nitrate components and cloth cellulose are volatiled away leaving the rare earth oxides within a newly formed silicate solid structure that has formed in the matrix of the previous cloth fabric with some 40% shrinkage .
It is very easy to get a filament extremely hot for a couple of seconds. It's very hard to get it extremely hot for much longer. An electrical arc (especially one of the temperature needed to produce good light) will absolutely vaporize its electrodes over time as well, but it takes much longer for it to do so than it takes for a carbon filament to burn itself out in atmosphere. Even a tungsten filament will rapidly oxidize under the same conditions. The fact that filaments need to be quite thin in order to produce good light (due to light only being able to escape at the filament's surface) certainly didn't do them any favors either.
Gravedigging a 2 year old comment, but a lot of breakthroughs in history were discoveries of material science. Once you get something with a property you haven't had before, suddenly a lot of applications become possible. There's actually a theory that the tea culture in China held them back this way because it prevented them from discovering glass as they used porcelain pots and those were fine.
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 the version I have heard for the China theory, from an anthropological perspective, is more due to the fact that East Asia has a lot of clay that is really good for making high-quality porcelain, part of the reason that to this day many English speaking countries call high quality porcelain products "fine China" - the clay needed very little refining before it could be fired into a quite well made porcelain.
“Forced my lute” means the gas pressure broke the connection to glass collection vessel meant to condense the gas vapor distilling from the retort. Typically, the gas would condense into a liquid, but the temperature would not have been low enough to condense the gas from the coal, so the pressure built up and forced the connections apart.
lute2 /luːt,ljuːt/ Learn to pronounce noun noun: lute; noun: luting liquid clay or cement used to seal a joint, coat a crucible, or protect a graft. a rubber seal for a jar. plural noun: lutes
I was born in 1947 in the USA. I am familiar with gas lights that were in my Grandmother's Victorian home. They were converted to electricity before I was born. I also remember outdoor kerosene lanterns that were used outdoors by road construction crews and railroads. I started collecting various bicycle, flat wick farm, railroad, and camping lanterns decades ago. Also have a few hollow wick lanterns and heater brass fuel reservoirs. My BSA Troop used Coleman white gasoline lanterns and camp cook stoves that had to be pumped up the be pressurized. The lamps were so bright that you could not look directly at them. Thank you for this walk back in time.
Here’s another interesting connection. When electric lighting was first being installed in buildings, they already had a route to run the wires: the gas pipes. The electric fixtures went up right where the gas fixtures had been, and the wires were pulled through the pipes that were already there. This way, electric conduit was “invented”.
Source? If you've pulled wires through actual conduit you know how hard even that is. Pulling wires through gas pipe seems almost impossible; the elbows are too sharp and the pipe has most likely not been reamed at the ends. I call BS
@@pasad335 Thanks for the reply. I don’t recall the source; sorry. You make a good point. I bet that the insulation could get stripped as the wire went a joint where the pipe ends were not reamed. But still, it could have been how the practice got started. Then, subsequently, people figured that they needed to have tubing that is more suitable for wire; curvy bends and free of sharp edges.
@@davidkantor7978 Yeah, interesting. I'm guessing some of the early gas piping was probably bent brass tubing. That could certainly work as electrical conduit.
5:20 There are "gasometers" in my train simulator. For years I could not figure out what these were or how to use them. After all these years, I finally know what one is.
Many interurban railroads were founded by coal gas companies in order to normalize a product of gasification of coal: electricity. If you could ride an electric interurban from Elgin to Chicago, you could safely put electricity into your house.
We have quite a few still in the UK - no longer operational but the structures are still there. They're all slowly being taken down & redeveloped which is for the best, but it is a shame to see the structures go
@@markwilliams2620 And now a good part of the former Elgin route is the Robert McClory and Skokie Valley bike trails. It was a lighter grade of rail than what Metra uses which is shared with freight.
@@roseroserose588 the redevelopment may be premature... if we are serious about moving to renewable gas they would be very useful. The modern gas holder has a membrane inside an outer dome. The outer dome is inflated by air (like a bouncy castle) and always looks the same. The gas bag inside inflates and deflates with the gas level. If there's a gas leak, you can detect it in the "overflow" air of the outer dome.
I was expecting to hear "carbon needs to be hotter to glow, as we see here as the soot is collected by the mantle".. as that was one of my first questions, why not use carbon mesh. It shows it so nicely, one of them glows, the other doesn't. You probably can't make carbon mesh to glow that brightly without using hydrogen and oxygen, or acetylen+oxygen.
IN the 1960s, there were power strikes in the UK for three hours at a time. I was staying with my aunt in London at the time, in an old house which still had working gas fittings in some rooms, although they'd not been used since the 1930s, when electricity had been installed. With some difficulty, I found a shop still selling gas mantles and fitting them enabled us to continue with gas lighting during the power cuts. It was a pity that the TV wasn't a gas one, too, but we did have a battery-operated radio!
1972, not the 1960s. I remember coming home from school, unlocking the front door and lighting the candle sitting on the table behind the door. It destroyed the Heath government and the next two general elections brought in a Labour administration until 1979. And I was a volunteer election worker in all those elections. The power workers weren't on strike - it was the coal miners. Now only a couple of percent - often less - of the country's electricity comes from burning coal. Because Thatcher (hawk, spit!) hated the miners.
@@michaelmoorrees3585 phlogiston /fləˈdʒɪst(ə)n,fləˈɡɪst(ə)n/ noun a substance supposed by 18th-century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion. I don't know, it sounds a lot like the magic smoke contained in electronics to me.
@@HadleyCanine it’s kind of neat though not sure if it’s dedicated video worthy. As memory serves though later called “Vaseline glass” it used to be called uranium glass. I’m sure you can guess why. Indeed uranium glass was a thing, and yes it had uranium in it. Technically the process turned it into more of a ceramic glass. The uranium allows you to temper it at a higher temperature and gives it that opaqueness. On second thought, it could be viable for a dedicated video. There actually is a lot to that process now that I sit and think about it.
I’m fascinated by anything which burns kerosene for energy, I have fridges, irons, stoves, heaters, but my favourite collection is over 200 Aladdin lamps from model 1 which was a brass body lamp through to the current glass models. Here in Australia Aladdin revolutionised kerosene lighting with their mantle lamps for all the reasons you’ve mentioned and Aladdin lamps are still used in some Outback locations today. Electricity is sometimes impractical to supply to extremely remote locations, so kerosene is still popular, it’s cheap, can be easily bulk stored, more easily than propane, and it doesn’t need wind or sun to run, plus the non pressurised Aladdins are silent. Aladdins are expensive though, even today, particularly some of the rarer models collectors are interested in. My mother told me when she was a young girl growing up on the farm with no electricity and only kerosene wick lamps and candles for lighting, only rich folk could afford an Aladdin lamp! Love the show. PS I’ve spent hours trying to get Aladdin burners to burn more evenly, it’s almost impossible, particularly model 23’s. I like your theory about wick thickness inconsistency, never looked at that closely. Steve from Aus.
@@Conservator. Some folk certainly use battery power and solar in the outback and particularly in urbane areas, but some parts of the outback are extremely isolated, therefore kerosene is a more versatile option as it can be used by devices other than lighting.
I was born in a farm cottage that was lit with “Aladdin” lamps (mid-1950s)…if I remember correctly my dad converted a couple into electric table lamps (these were ones with metal fuel tanks, so he drilled holes in them to run cables). They even had lampshades because the original light from the mantle was so white and harsh.
Farm cottage , Yorkshire 1950s, great comfort in light & heat , also for carrying around the lambing fields ! The mantles were very fragile , like ash , and the light significantly brighter & more useful than a simple flame, The heat emitted was significant, but heated the room , and I think that some were adapted to heating a small cooking pan. Also I read that Thermo-couples were fitted to make electricity , long ago !
When I was a kid we used to use those Coleman lanterns all the time on hunting and camping trips. If I remember correctly, you never wanted to touch the mantle itself; if you did, it would just disintegrate into a fine powder when you touched it.
Same, apparently it was "petroleum naphtha" liquid fuel that had to be pressurized by hand for the first few minutes of operation. Then a generator of some kind used heat to keep the feed going. I was always getting in trouble for being too rough with it. Tying on new mantles took a bit of finesse.
@@frederf3227 Yup. You used to be able to buy "white gas" fuel (I've been told it was simply unleaded gasoline) at service stations. When I was a kid, every family camping trip started with a trip to the gas station to buy a gallon of lantern fuel. I remember my dad pumping up the fuel tank of the old Coleman lantern when the light started to dim. I prefer propane.
@@dstone1701 When I was a kid, my parents joined this cult up in the woods. We used a lot Coleman lanterns. I could never figure out the how and why of mantles. I think somebody gave me a really bad (and very wrong) explanation, but watching this video has clarified the science behind it.
@@dstone1701 This is the stuff. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha It's the only thing we used in our Coleman lamps and stoves back in the 70's and 80's before the little propane cannisters became a thing. Before reading the Wiki page I had no idea it was the same thing as the 'lighter fluid' my dad used in his Zippo.
@@dstone1701 the white gas evaporates completely from your fingers and gear and doesn't leave a residue or smell. I prefer the white gas to propane as it's more energy dense, has lighter containers on account of not needing to be stored at high pressure, easier to see how much you have left and better for cold weather, but white gas is certainly fiddly with the pumping. On a nice summer daycamping trip, propane would be so much less trouble.
I realize I’m stating the obvious here, but dude, you have a gift. You can take topics which would normally be considered dry, boring, mundane, and make them RIVETING. I don’t know how you do it, but please keep doing it.
This channel is an absolute gold mine of long form content for my autistic brain. Every video has such a consistent format and is SO well researched. You make the most random everyday objects super interesting
I like the word gazomètre because the height of the cover actually gives a visible measure of how much gaz is in stock. And also because I'm french and this word looks far more french to me than gazofeet or gazoyard
We had a gasometer near us. The cylinder floats in water to make a seal. The more gas you have the higher the cylinder. This maintained a level pressure so I would say it could be classed as a Meter as it gave you a visual indication of how much gas you had left.
I used to work in gas utilities. The gasholder / gasometer is dual function (although we referred to the locations as holder stations), town gas was produced around the clock and natural gas is transported likewise. So local storage during low demand was needed as they function at relatively low pressure. Also release gas to the system during high demand, regulating pressure. They have become largely obsolete as the supergrid network can be over pressured for storage and exhausted gas fields can be re stocked. Yes putting gas back underground is a thing.
"someone asked for a simulated hurricane, I can't do that but" -proceedes to do that Lol I love this series, it's just the right amount of comical built into a very informative package to me.
I am familiar with hurricane lanterns and Coleman lanterns, but I never heard of the Alladin variant. I've always wondered about how mantles actually work and what they are made of despite my using them numerous times. Thanks for your thorough and interesting video.
I ain't yet watched entire video... Those mantles represent the first commercial use of rare earth elements/lanthanides . A number of the rare earth elements glow brightly at reasonably achieved temperature. Cerium and thorium especially I remember. Thorium was the best performer and no longer used today . A fresh mantle is a cloth impregnated with nitrates of the rare earths and a silicon based chemical perhaps ammonium silicate. After commissioning by burning the installed mantle in situ, the ammonium and nitrate components and cloth cellulose are volatiled away leaving the rare earth oxides within a newly formed silicate solid structure that has formed in the matrix of the previous cloth fabric with some 40% shrinkage .
Alladin, Coleman, Tilley, Primus, Optimus - they're just trade marks. Effectively doing the same job, but with *non-interchangeable* parts (jets, prickers, pump washers, seals ...) for "vendor lock-in" - which has been around since the Victorians. The only reason the mantles are interchangeable is because the few *mantle* manufacturers don't want to sell 4 different product lines, and just make a one size fits all".
There are still a lot (about 1750, I think) of gas lamps in London. They're scattered around Westminster and the city. Others that look alike have been fitted with electric lamps. A team of six people maintains them, which includes winding up the clockwork timer that opens and closes the valve. The mantles come from Germany.
@@Biggles732 No. Acetylene burning in air gives a very yellow, VERY sooty flame. Which is quite nice - we used to use them for caving, under the nickname of "stinkies". (The calcium carbide used to generate the acetylene often had traces of calcium phosphide, which produced phosphine gas and a very distinctive smell.) You are probably thinking of burning a mixture of acetylene gas pre-mixed with oxygen before being fed into the burner. Two gas bottles (or a generator and an air pump) feeding two hoses in one burner. Which *does* produce a bright blue flame.
What wonderful memories this brought back to me! My maternal grandparents lived in a stone cottage in rural North Wales and, in the 1950s, had no electricity. It was so restful sitting in the "living room" in the winter, with the coal range and an Aladdin lamp on the table producing enough light to read by even if not at the table. Even though the fire was usually kept low to save coal, unless you were boiling a kettle or baking in the small oven built into the range, the room was indeed kept warm by the heat from the Aladdin lamp. At bedtime, you used an old-fashioned candle holder to walk down the narrow passageway to the bedroom, where it was much colder, and the candle was put out as soon as you were in bed, leaving you in total darkness. I would not be upset if I was forced to live like that again, especially in such a beautiful part of Wales.
Same here, in NW Scotland, we only got connected to the grid in 1979 I believe. Great memories of the gentle hiss of a Tilly Lantern, and the incredible ,soft light that they produced. I am seriously considering going off grid again now, it’s funny how everything comes around…. I can still remember the smells of paraffin and methylated spirit- I was fascinated by the beautiful purple colour as a kid! 👌
Interesting and informative video. I remember many years ago having a Coleman lamp with the bag shaped mantles like at 17 minutes. When new, you had to burn off some material that was blue if my memory serves me right. After that, they worked well, putting out a lot of light. The fuel it used was naptha.
I live in a part of California that loses power a lot so my family used to have a lot of lanterns in the cabin. I always loved when there would be a blackout because then our cabin would look like something from the 1800's, especially since my dad loves antiques. My favorite was always my little railway lantern, but when dad wanted to do some wood carving or something in the living room, he would light up one of those aladdin lamps and boy howdy did they glow bright! Thank you so much for this entire lantern series! It has been a blast to learn more about the history of these marvelous illuminators!
So I did a ton of undergrad research into lanthanides like the yttrium used in that mantle and I can say there is no catalytic reaction going on. What is happening is just that the correct fuel to air ratio is occurring and a non dirty flame is happening. That dirty kerosene smell that comes from the Dietz lamps is due to the candle not being able to burn hot enough with enough air to actually burn all the fuel. The aladdin lamp is providing both enough airflow and draft that the flame can get hot enough to burn cleanly.
They are very, very, very slightly radioactive. Not at all dangerous, just enough radioactivity that you can demonstrate with an alcohol vapor chamber in a high school science class (they emit alpha particles which leave behind big, fat clouds of alcohol vapor).
It is real similar to "burning out the carbon". This was a technique used in the 1940s thru 1970s to improve automobile performance and mileage. Slow driving results in low engine temps, which led to carbon build-up on valves and seats, thereby causing incomplete sealing and poor performance. Occasionally , we would take the car out to a straight stretch of road and drive as hard and fast as possible. This would burn the carbon build up off the valves, and the car would run better. The proof was all the black smoke that would roll out the tail pipes during the first run. And for all the smart alecks, who are going to say THAT was oil leaking around the valve seals? You're just wrong, and obviously too young to have "been there". And too sure of your own, obviously inadequate knowledge. I was there, being now 72yo, and I also have a Masters in Mechanical Engineering.
I bought my Aladdin lamp at a local hardware store about 15 years ago. I had been using propane fired gas lights in an older camping trailer and wanted the option of using a kerosene source. My brother had used an Aladdin lamp in his home 40 years ago which had a fixture which would allow him to hold a pan for cooking above the lamp. That provided an increase in efficiency, light and cooking, and enough heat to take the chill off the cabin on cool, but not too cold, nights. We had used Coleman lanterns fueled by white gas back in the 1950's, so we have used all 3 types of incandescent mantle lamps over the years. Although I still have all these lanterns, the great improvement in efficiency of LED lights and rechargeable batteries may mean that they will just be relics on the shelf as curiosities. This presentation provided some interesting history and details I had not been aware of.
Yeah, the 2nd word always has to be a greek one (meter), and if not, then at least a french one (reservoir)... Or else, everybody will know, that you don´t take your business seriously...
Gasometers were a part of my childhood (and deserve an episode of their own). They were everywhere in those days (50s and 60s) and you could while away hours and hours 'watching' them rise and fall (much like clocks, you knew they were doing it, but could never actually see them move!). The sections were sealed with water (or rather the lower sections were stored in a circular trench of water), so when they were full, the top section looked OK, but the lower sections got progressively more rusty. We had an old disused one outside our flat until quite recently (early 2000s), and I've not seen any others locally since it was dismantled, so it must have been one of the very last ones still standing. Although they were, of course, used for storing gas, their main use was to maintain a steady pressure in the gas main. A very simple answer to a very tricky problem.
Interesting... so in a way they did "measure" something. Not just the amount of gas currently inside, but also the relationship between the generation and usage rates.
Fascinating stuff. As an old man now (b. 1954), I have seen some of this technology in use, and heard more about it from my father. When on holiday in caravans, we would use gas lighting with mantles. They tended to burn brighter the longer they burned, so you had to reduce the gas flow after a while. Eventually, the fragile ash mantle would fail, either due to the carbonisation you mention or because vibration in the caravan would fracture it. My father was raised in a house where the only source of lighting came from 'fish tail' gas lights. He took a candle with him when he went to bed.
Asbestos is still in very wide use today in the US. It is just not used in residential settings, only certain industrial uses. And it is no more of an issue than gasoline is. Asbestos is perfectly fine as long as you don't create dust. Gasoline is perfectly fine as long as you don't let it create vapor.
This was the first experiment I taught to my Introductory Physical Science classes. Wood splints were heated in a test tube retort and it was observed that a new solid (charcoal), a flammable liquid (wood alcohol) and a flammable gas was produced. The wood could be decomposed into new substances, but not put back together. A great experiment raising many questions.
In my encounter with that as a student, the teacher used a cigarette instead of a wood splint. The stuff that came out of that served to make me a lifelong non-smoker.
My Grandparents had a cottage on an island from the 80's up to the early 2000's. Up until about '95, the whole place was powered with propane. Lights, stove, even the fridge, all propane powered. The water was pumped from the lake with a gasoline powered pump to a small water tower. After the electric upgrade (which would be wildly expensive today), the stove remained propane, and one light, in a little corner with a comfy chair, and a perfect view of the lake, the perfect spot to curl up with a book, was left alone, it still works.
I have no idea what “forced my lute” means, but “broke my glasses” sounds as if the gas pressure built up inside his apparatus until it broke his glassware
Lute was a material used for sealing alchemical apparatus back in the day. So combined with the next phrase, I'm pretty sure he's talking about it actually breaking his equipment.
As a technician, I was drawn here by the title and I found the content very informative and interesting. What fascinated me most is your use of and skill in English language. Not too common for a person covering this type of a topic. A master orator.
What fascinates me is seeing a comment like yours. I find his style of presentation so grating that I quit the clip two minutes in, even though the topic's quite interesting. I have a severe aversion to the cheap gimmick of pretending that ideas are taking the speaker by surprise when it's obvious that they aren't; e.g., his way of mentioning that _retort_ doesn't mean another sense of the word, etc. It reminds me of a typical script from _Friends,_ i.e., makes me want to puke. Okay, it just makes me shudder, but either way, I don't watch anything presented in that style... and SpewTube is infested with it. Anyway, he's the very opposite of a master orator.
He gets to the gas mantle just before the 11 min mark. Thanks for the great educational video, and a huge thanks for not ruining it with crappy background music while you're talking. I don't know why some people are compelled to add annoying background music throughout the video.
When I was younger, the Coleman lantern was the choice for camp lighting. I recall a 21 year old intoxicated me grabbing a Coleman that "brewed up" in a friend's camp and setting it on a rock ledge outside where it could burn itself out safely. It was a fun stay. Later that night we watched FB-111'S flying in and out of Plattsburgh AFB 20 miles away. The next morning, we were all recovering from the night before... eating eggs and rabbit hash out on the ledge when an A-10 flew up the valley. We were looking down at the pilot, who saw us waving and waggled his wings. Good times.
Your video was so much fun. I'm 66 and originally from the UK. When I was 5 my parents were really poor and we lived for a few years in an uncle's holiday cottage that didn't have electricity, so it was illuminated with gas mantles everywhere. This was before the advent of Methane/Natural Gas. One of the fun things you forgot to mention is that coal gas is heavier than air. So in the winter and if your house was sealed really well it could asphyxiate you and if you woke up and lit a candle it would blow the house and you to smithereens (lovely word). It had a distinctive smell much like essence of old engine oil, My parents reinforced the rule in both my sister and me that if we smelt it we were to yell and run outside. The only problem was that we always could smell it. I can't wait for your next video and I'm assuming you have a Tilley lamp in the video. I have two for our power failure kit because they are staggeringly bright and only a bit explosive. They can run on all the kerosene derivatives (Jet A1 works particularly well) although red diesel seems to gunk up the tubes after a while. You would have to be mad to run a pressure vapour lamp on gasoline so I bought one of Coleman lamps but it definitely make me itch when it's running. The Tilley lamp is hilarious because you usually set fire to a small bath under the mantle of methylated spirits to pre-heat the lamp to get it up to temperature. Once it gets going though it's so bright you can illuminate a whole campsite.
Thank you...I now understand what this gas mantle "thing" is. I encountered it as a concept for the first time today, and once I saw what new ones, ready to be used, look like, I was very confused as to how a fabric net bag became a helpful and desirable item once subjected to flame. GOT IT NOW. Much thanks, no more confusion. Very clever invention to improve the usability of the then-available technology. Can you imagine people being smart and careful enough to use this in their homes now? Drivers have trouble nowadays simply remembering to turn the headlights on for their cars at night...
gaslighting is specifically a reference to a play/movie called Gas Light in which an abusive husband uses manipulative tactics and denial to conceal the truth from his wife
@@robertschnobert9090 @littlesnowflakepunk The husband turns down the gaslights, then lies to the wife that the lights are the same. The origin is that he is making her doubt her sanity through manipulation of the gaslights
@@colem7173 and the lights dim, because he goes to the attic, searching for a "treasure", and the lights downstairs dim while he's using gaslight upstairs, causing the pressure to drop.
When I grew up the gasometers in the local town were quite visible and they had scales up the side so you could tell how much gas was in them so they were in affect measuring devices.
When the centre is high the container is full as the contents is used the container falls, the weight of the container pushing against the gas inside giving gas pressure in the pipes.
For anyone in Aus born before 1970 gasometers should not be a mystery. Given that , even without measurements on the side, it's possible to gauge the amount of gas held at any time, "gasometer" is the most appropriate name for them.
Two massive units were astride the 405 Freeway in Long Beach, California -- for years. They eventually became buffers for the adjacent refinery -- IIRC. This was the same refinery that Cody Jarrett blew up in "White Heat." He was atop spherical propane-butane tanks... a bad place to smoke. They must be gone by now -- so old -- and sitting atop valuable land.
Occasionally a gasometer would blow up. I remember one did so in Copenhagen in the seventies causing great damage as domestic housing was built much too close.
Extremely interesting. Really appreciate bridging the gaps leading up to electric light. Your research and presentation ability, attention to detail and admission of imperfection in knowledge in some rare but understandable cases make your videos a true pleasure to watch. It amazes me how curious you are about such a wide range of topics.
You've done it again! This is the second video of TC that I've watched and like the first, it is so entertaining and educational, both at the same time. You're such a natural explainer of complicated things.
@UC8qWIA7WaG4fU0yuFY4YUHg However, it is still not its primary purpose. A voltmeter exists primarily to measure electricity; a gasometer CAN measure the contents in it, about as much as a glass of sufficiently standard size CAN measure an amount of water volume in it (if you use it repeatedly, anyways).
@@Lapantouflemagic0 The design of these reservoirs gave an indication of how much the vessels contained. You do realise the sides raised and lowered under the system pressure. When full, all side rings were raised (sealed at base and top of each segment, by water in a trough), when empty walls lowered to ground level. A metal framework that guided the concertina like walls didn't collapse, giving an indication of capacity. So yeah, not a 'scientific instrument', but neither is an uncalibrated galvanometer or voltmeter, but the suffix meter is appropriate.
@@wallabra I think the reason it's called a gasometer is because it provides a metered (or controlled/ measured) flow of gas. I think it was also to troll scientists, though.
@@BTW... to be honest i had absolutely no idea whatsoever of what those things looked like. looking into it i see you're right, but those are still primarily storage devices still, a gasometer in any reasonnable understanding should not be a buidling
or maybe telling someone to stop trying to force my lute. "you may not like what i have to say but trying to force my lute isn't going to change my mind." their confusion over what you just said should buy you enough time to make a quick egress.
If the guy talking about a lute being a clay seal on a crucible, then us taking this phrase on as an expression for frustration will make for some wonderful reading on an encyclopaedia one day. Let's do it.
Cool video. When I was in the Canadian Forces from 1980 -1997and I was posted to Comox BC in 1991, one of my secondary duties was as a member of the Nuclear Emergency Response Team (NERT). When training with the equipment to used to detect and locate radioactive material, we used live Radioactive material and of course a much safer training material. That training material was the new (unburnt) Coleman mantels for the lantern which worked well as a training aid.
I use a Coleman "white gas" lamp while camping. I grew up around these lamps. I remember my dad taking the lamp and pumping it to pressurize the tank. My dad used to pull out the mantle after the old one would get a hole.
I do appreciate more and more the cleverclogs concept of the mantle, and the entertainment factor of alarming people with a roaring geiger counter never gets old, I still forever associate them with the seared-in memory of being utterly blinded by that hissing nightmare on camping trips. "Enjoying all those stars? Here lets light up the GODDAMN SUN right at eye level"
indeed. In boy scouts, they had them on long poles attached to propane tanks like you'd find in a gas grill. And they had 5 of them for the main area, obliterating your night vision so you'd find every ankle-busting root on the way back to your tent....
My dad took me gigging with a tilley back in the day. Then I took it up with my friends using a gas lamp. Then a halogen H4 and a car battery. Now you could probably just use a key chain LED.
I like seeing how things are invented and created. And it just shows people new how to do it from way before they just never pressed on to actually master it and obtain utility. That is why I believe we are more advanced than we think, and we need to discover less and tie more ends to get what we want.
Some of my fondest memories from childhood are watching my dad change the mantles on our Coleman lantern before heading out to 'the land' for a hunting weekend. And then the gurgling hiss of the lantern lighting up our entire campsite from pitch black. Good times.
That's interesting. I had a house in Scotland that still had some old lead gas pipes in the walls for lighting but they were only about 1/4" inside diameter.
@@Phiyedough Yes... our house in Los Angeles was built in 1914 and had gas light fittings in every room. Electrical wiring was installed later, obviously. As a young kid, I wondered why the gas outlets were so high. Of course, they were for gas lamps. The house is still there and probably still has the hidden gas pipes running through every room (of course, empty).
I have a lamp which was originally a gas lamp. It was converted to electric and the wiring runs through the remaining gas fitting on the base of the lamp. Had my brother (owns hundreds of kerosene lamps) not told me, I would never had known it wasn't originally electric.
@@bsperoz well the song was written under the same assumption, it's about living a life on stage, as a celebrity or other public figure who would be in the literal limelight
Gas lights is where we get the phrase “TURN the light on”. As you said, there were valves; not switches. Thus, you really don’t “turn” on an electric light, but the term had been established and just stuck.
@@erinfinn2273 No - electric switches and gas valves are wildly different. The designers wanted to maintain familiarity however. Wiring was however run through the old gas pipes - which is why American electrical conduit still uses pressure tight threads. The other power source in most cities was water - the hydraulic power systems continued in service until the 1960’s running lifts. The hydraulic power pipes in London were repurposed in the 1980’s for fibre optic cable runs.
@@allangibson2408 I guess what I meant was that the interface was just repurposed. I do know the mechanical differences between gas and electric switches. You just said what I wanted to say clearer. Edit: I made that post when I was very tired. I mean no disrespect to anyone's intellect. Also, didn't know about the municipal hydraulics system. That's cool.
Wow. It took me 33 years to realize why natural gas is called natural gas. I can't thank you enough for your well researched and very educational videos.
@@felixmervamee7834 Actually -- it WAS. What is here described as 'coal gas' was rarely so named. Instead, the terms: 'city-gas' ( the stuff was never seen outside of cities ); 'manufactured gas', 'lighting gas' were much more common. If you roll back through old Hitchcock horrors -- one scene stood out -- a murder victim is held -- head first -- into an oven. In the scene, the pilot lamp has been put out by the murderer -- and the audience is left squirming as the event goes on and on. The murderer is holding his head to the side -- while the poor victim is forced to inhale carbon monoxide. This ultra nasty reputation IS what the new term was contrasting against. You'll find other, similar scenes, from crime dramas dated back in time, the era before natural gas. Natural gas took off when the Texas Railroad Commission compelled oil companies to gather it -- not flare it -- as had been the custom. This was resisted -- at first -- until it became idiot obvious that said natural gas could be sold in a big way to ammonia plants... facilities that weren't too far down the road. ( The US government paid for massive plants to generate ammonia => nitric acid => explosives during WWII.) Until then, natural gas had no market. Retail consumption was nil. When the war ended, the industry had to find new buyers -- and soon did.
My outing club owns a cabin in the woods that's off the electric grid. They get big bottles of propane delivered once a year and use that to run gas-powered heat, lights, and stove. I had to replace the mantles on the gas lamps a couple times, and we were trained about how incredibly fragile they were. I never quite understood how they worked, and now this all makes so much more sense!
I was going to say it's not useless, but I thought about it, and I agree that it would mostly be a novelty purchase with minimal utility. I'm sure it does it's job very well, but it's unlikely that it would be useful in practice. I think I'd salvage car batteries, voltage regulators, and LED lights from dumps before I tried to weave itrium salt cotton thread mantles for the one Aladdin kerosene lamp I've been hanging onto throughout the apocalypse.
I remember the Thorium nets. We had a lamp with one when I was a kid and used it on all our camping trips. My father, then a physics teacher, had access to a Geiger counter and just for giggles he brought it home and pointed it at the lamp. The noise that followed was quite scary. We didn’t stop using it though. Different times. 😳
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Yep! My dad would sometimes bring us to his cabin near his little hobby apiary. There was no running water or electricity, so we'd use this kind of lamp with a propane bottle. I was very fascinated by the glowing fabric and he'd always tell me to not touch the mantle, said that it'll give me cancer. That was 15 years ago.
My dad was a doctor. We lived in the south and the mosquitoes were fierce. Back then, mosquito repellents weren't very effective. He made a mosquito repellent that worked perfectly. Just apply it liberally all over your body and you never got a single bite. It was kerosene and sevin mixed together. Amazingly, I'm still alive and in good health. He was quite aware of the risks but insisted that it was still healthier than getting 100s of bites every day.
Thorium goes through alpha decay, so it's not that dangerous as long as it's outside of your body. It becomes dangerous when you accidentally inhale or swallow the radioactive dust particles, which is a real possibility with a mantle.
It's notTHAT dangerous for the user, as long as you don't let the pieces of the mantle get into you (harder than it sounds, as it's basically ash, but not that hard...) It's the manufacturing (especially back when nobody knew anything about radioactivity, and dumped thorium waste like it's nothing) that's the real trouble. Some of the old gas mantle plant sites are still being decontaminated.
Back in the day (the 1970s), we went camping with a Coleman lantern that had two of what we always called 'booties', and I remember they were considered to be VERY fragile and at the time I remembered them to be radioactive in some way.
I remember we had a celling lamp in our mountain cabin in Norway utilizing gas mantle back in the 80s. I do recall they was expensive and a massive upgrade on normal parafin lamps we had in the rest of the cabin. Thanks for the entire series of fantastic videos.
Am I the only one who: 1. wasn't using gas lanterns before 🔦 2. understands and digests all the information we are being given about how they are no longer the best option 💡 3. and yet now finds them romantically appealing and wants to start using them perhaps in limited capacity? 🏮 I can't be the only one feeling that, right? 😉
Nice to see Deviant watches the same stuff I do! lol. I've never known anything about Lanterns before this series, but now I have a ton of useless info to spout to others. btw - I hope to see you speak in person sometime, I enjoy your sessions and have learned ALOT from them. (Senior Cyber Security Lead/Architect at a fortune 500 company here)
@@maybearkamaybenot11 You could always look at his youtube account, based on the consistency of uploads and subscriber account he's either the actual Deviant Ollam or a very dedicated fake.
We had candles on our Christmas tree when I was a kid. Never burned anything down. Also in the 1950s owners manual for your car told you how to adjust the valves, today they tell you not to drink the contents of the battery. Says it all.
I run an isotope handling course at a university, one of my props (among many) to demonstrate the response of the contamination monitor is a thoriated gas mantle. They certainly send the Geiger tubes crackling.
Holy crap I remember all of these mechanics from my childhood- new mantle is flexible, the initial burn in, then its fragile- and most of all, do not touch that glass if it goes out after an hour. Really cool man.
I was especially excited for this episode. My parents used to take us camping when we were young and we had one of those propane-bottle & wick lamps. It was always this mystical beast, being a combination of very powerful but also quite fragile. I was very excited to finally learn how it all worked.
Where I live we have naphtha lanterns for camping, I remember asking "what happens if we touch the wick while it's on?" The answer I got was "not only will you disintegrate the wick, but you'll also severely burn your finger."
I remember camping as a child in the 80s, and our propane lamps had a single wick in the middle, and a portable propane cylinder underneath. Larger than the one in the video, but smaller than a BBQ gas bottle.
I have both propane and gas lanterns. I mainly use the propane lantern though. I just bought a tree to put on my 20lb tank that the lantern can sit on top. Much cheaper to refill the 20lb tank than keep buying the little 1lb canisters plus the tree lets me connect my propane stove to it too. I also have an old 3 burner gas stove that has the propane conversion kit, which is just a pipe with a threaded end for the propane to connect to. Nothing else had to be changed other than to remove the gas tank.
@@jasonantes9500 So confusing reading the word gas in this context. My use of it was as a synonym for propane/butane, aka liquefied petroleum gas, LPG for short. We (Australia) understand the abbreviation gas for gasoline, in context with American cars, but our cars that run on gas use LPG or autogas. So my BBQ gas bottle referred to above was an 8.5kg LPG cylinder.
@@jemsterr Yeah, different parts of the world different vernacular. Yes, my use of gas is short for gasoline. I could have said dual fuel too I suppose. Anyway, cheers!
In Vienna there where some big "gasometer"'s that are now repurposed, but when they where holding has you could tell by how high or low the containers held by the structure where how full they where
@@alexe8375 well, the frames were moved to the other side of the canal and fancy apartments were built inside them. The material that actually held the gas was far too toxic to reuse.
There existed in my city, a gasometer, until about 10years ago. It was a 'listed' building. It was not actually in use. Then they decided to use the land for a supermarket. The telescopic dome floated on water which acted as a seal, and it expanded as gas was added.
Finally, an explanation of the mantle! I have a vivid memory from my childhood of finding an old lamp like this, removing the glass, and touching the mantle. It crumbled and I was beyond confused, having thought it was a cloth of some sort.
ain't yet watched entire video... Those mantles represent the first commercial use of rare earth elements/lanthanides . A number of the rare earth elements glow brightly at reasonably achieved temperature. Cerium and thorium especially I remember. Thorium was the best performer and no longer used today . A fresh mantle is a cloth impregnated with nitrates of the rare earths and a silicon based chemical perhaps ammonium silicate. After commissioning by burning the installed mantle in situ, the ammonium and nitrate components and cloth cellulose are volatiled away leaving the rare earth oxides within a newly formed silicate solid structure that has formed in the matrix of the previous cloth fabric with some 40% shrinkage .
I hope this series continues onto safety lanterns used in mining for some years. I believe they have a 'flame arrester' to prevent them from causing explosions.
they basically had a fine mesh that when the methane entered through it into the lamp it would safely burn without spreading the flame outside of the lamp. I'm not so sure on the physics of why that occurs but it does.
@@A.Martin It was demonstrated at the Royal Institute by Humphry David who invented the lamp. The way it works is that the screen is small enough to let combustion gasses through but not the flame front. The original filter was a bundle of tiny tubes that formed the screen which cooled the flame front to below combustion temperature so no flame could progress to other side of the filter. Think of a bundle of drinking straws but shrunk down by 80% and made out of brass. It was eventually refined by using a stack of woven brass screens with fine brass wire and each screen was spaced about a quarter of an inch apart. If you look at a miners lamp there's a large collar that looks like a hood above the light glass. The filter is housed in that hood.
Hey! We found what “forced my lute” meant! Back in ye olde chemistry days, lute was a substance used to make seals between your various chemistry apparatus. So, Clayton was probably saying the 330 year old equivalent of “blew the seals” (or indeed, the pressure was sufficient to break the glass!).
Oh, and somehow I missed pointing out when the Aladdin lamp was first produced. The trademark was obtained in 1908 and the first lamps went on sale in 1909. Also of note, one source claims lamps made after 1935 were technically side-draft designs, meaning air doesn’t actually travel through the center of the wick. So “central draft burner” as used in my script here might be considered a misnomer.
Basically sealing putty
"did you blow a seal or is that frost on your mustash?" famous youtuber "AVE"
@@und4287 sulphuric acid is the standard joint sealer in chemistry except where that may interfere or react badly with the reactants or products.
Well now the post I was about to make explaining that feels a lot less inciteful.
A "lute" is still a term we use in industrial sampling systems today
This series has been illuminating.
It has brightened my day.
Thanks for shining a light on these lamps
It really *shone a light* on the details.
My life just went up a few lumens.
Badun tiss
Thank you for gaslighting all of us.
first
A wild Zonday sighting! Such a marvelous creature! Hope you're emerging well from the plague!
Chocolate rain!! Pepperidge Farm remembers!
Hay tay
I hope you've been well, and it's cool to see you enjoying the same amazing content that I like!
Lute, In Chemistry: it is a liquid clay or cement used to seal a joint, coat a crucible, or protect a graft. As for "protect a graft", again, in chemistry, it is referring to something like a long, thin, glass tube inserted through a hole made in the side of large glass beaker; the graft being that 'connection'. Whereas, again in chemistry, a "joint" is specifically where two ends are 'joined' together. Thus, the phrase, "...forced my lute", means that it broke through material that sealed and connected the 2-piece glass made item together.
THANK YOU!!!
Goat
who up forcing they lute
I assumed about the same. I wasnt familiar with the terminology, but I figured it meant one of th glass containers exploded or broke.
I thought the person meant "Force My Loot" as in "forcing treasure or valuables down through something".
You need a counter for "we'll get to that later" which counts up and then back down as you, well, get to those points later.
Or not!
Yeah, the problem with that is when the counter does not return to zero by the end of the video it is visible to all. The way it is now, he has some plausible deniability to say "oops, I forget about xxx" in the comments or another video.
Still waiting on Teletext.
That's a good idea from three years ago. We'll get to that later.
Stack memory, in assembly language
As a young boy in rural Philippines, I enjoyed watching my father light our Petromax lantern that had a mantle. I still remember my elation whenever the mantle would suddenly burst into brightness as it got heated and immediately flooded our dark living room with an intense light. Yes, whenever the mantle needed replacing, he would buy one from the town hardware and the new mantle would seem to me like a sock that he would fit over the lamp's burner. I did not quite understand how it worked then and I was just fascinated by it. I brings me happiness, now as old man, to remember these things.
You have seen such change in this world. I wonder what I shall see. Hope your still being fascinated by stuff
@@Aztesticals Yes, a lot of spectacular events in my lifetime: the first landing on the moon, the first successful heart transplant, the invention of the cellphone and its progress into the smart phone, the internet and how it has made exchange and acquisition of communication so much easier , among other things. When I was young, same sex relations were frowned upon, today it is touted as part of basic human rights. A lot of change, indeed has happened in the world within my lifetime, and yes I am continuously fascinated by it all. Thank you. And yes, (and here, judging by your comment) I am assuming that you are of the much younger generation) you shall see a lot of "change" I am sure one of which shall be the first landing on Mars. Oh, I envy you for by then I shall be dust.
@@herminigildojakosalem8664 hey don't say that last part. Earliest estimates are within 9-12 years in the Artemis gets the public interested again enough for the fed in the usa to give nasa the funds. You made it this far hold strong and hope. I might not be very religious but il find a prayer tonight to hope you live to see it. It's my dream to see that as well and to be able to go to space one day. Jot as an astronaut but as a tourist.. hopefully by my 50s since I'm 23 now they will have made space hotels and all.
@@Aztesticals You are so young. You have all the time in the world. 9 -12 years? I would be so blessed if I make that. BTW I am now 65 years old, having been born in 1957 and beset with all the ails that come with the age (hypertension, diabetes, vertigo, etc) he-he (hu-hu-hu)
@@herminigildojakosalem8664 thanks and hey I've had a 108 yo great great aunt. A 101 yo great uncle, 97 yo great grandma, and a good few other family memebers live into their early 90s, late 80s. And our family has a history of high blood pressure and diabetes. And medicine is getting to the point that it actually scares me. But either way I hope you enjoy every last day you got. And let's hope for some incredible things to see in the next 5 years.
“It forced my lute.”
When devices were made that had pipes or other attachments added to them which need to be made air tight or pressure resistant, a paste of some sort was prepare and applied to the joint. This paste was referred to as “luting.”
Moonshiners used a paste of barley or rye flour mixed with water.
Like Fuji 9 luting cement!
@@FrancisCWolfe It allows you to do your own dentistry, too!
Sounds plausible. This means that 'forcing the lute' and 'breaking my glasses' might imply that pressure was building up in the destillation apparatus. The pressurized/quickly expanding gas either forced the joints to leak or simply bust the glass equipment.
@@darktoranaga Fuji 9
Exactly! See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lute_(material)
My 92-year-old mother who grew up without electricity knows all about these lamps. Matter of fact there was one left in The Farmhouse and when we had a power failure amazed how much light it puts out
Hard to believe we've gone from burning fuel for light to color-changing wi-fi enabled LED smart bulbs in a single person's lifetime. What's even crazier is that we already take our modern lighting for granted.
@@methos1999 ....well technically fuel is still burnt to generate electricity to power led bulbs & other appliances. Today World industry is just trying to cut off the fuel usage by turning everything to electrification.
@@methos1999 The gap in technology is I assume exaggerated by their rural upbringing. Some notable events of 1931 include the completion of the Empire State Building, the first non-stop flight across the Pacific Ocean, and the invention of the particle accelerator.
I'm a landlord in the UK and occasionally I come across the lead pipes used to feed gas matles from well over 100 years ago still buried in the walls of the houses.
People still use the Alladin lamps on remote ranches and mining claims especially at high altitude because it gets too cold for propane to work, and they don't have or can't start a generator. An alcohol or kerosene stove or heater will also still work at very low temperatures.
22:45 I really appreciate you fully showing the carbon buildup disappearing. that was very satisfying
ISTR it wasn't always easy to remove a soot spot, it could take a while fiddling with the wick to burn it off because too low and there wasn't enough heat to get it glowing, but turn it up a fraction too high and you'd see the yellow flame licking up the outside of the mantle. I still have an Aladdin of the type we used in the 1970s, but haven't yet had a use for it, Kerosene OTOH is a useful degreaser, I usually have some handy.
Yeah it was, it was like a movie special effect and very cool.
Yes.
@@grumpus27 have you tried Coleman $1 socks retrofitted to the Aladdin?
I went to order new mantles last year and was just shocked ($38 for one). Went to the hardware store, bought a pack of two Coleman aftermarket soft mantles for 2.25. Tied one to the harp base and ring. Sprayed it with my wife's AquaNet till it was stiff and the right shape. Works fine.
@@MrBilld75 Come to think of it, it looked similar to the disintegration effects I've seen recently catching up on the Marvel shows.
Or rather, Marvel have captured that disintegration effect wonderfully in their CGI.
As a hard of hearing / deaf person, I really appreciate that you always make sure that your videos have captions. I'm a fellow engineer and I love it when you release new content, even if I already know about it. I've been meaning to post that comment for a while, but figured I would do it on this video that you just released and it already has captions. Thank you!
it is brilliant isn't it?
Proper subtitles also really help when using auto-translate for non-native speakers to follow along, such as my wife :D
@@AnonymaxUK As a non-native speaker myself I'm sometimes getting lost when people talk too fast. Unfortuatelly automatically generated subtitles usually derail at the same time, so unless author ads proper ones, parts of the video stay incomprehensible
@@windy916 Auto-generated only works 85% well if the script is good (to give proper context so words that have different meanings will translate properly) and the audio is crystal clear. My wife prefers the English auto-generated ones because the translations of them just add to the confusion. Scripted captions are amazing, and I think there's many TH-camrs who gain an audience purely because of them.
Same here. Captions are needed with all video that I watch now.
I always liked the German term for gas mantles. "Glühstrumpf" which literally translates as "glow stocking".
Technically not even wrong 😂
Even the term "Strumpflampe" "Stocking Lantern" was quite common. My Grandmother used it often to distinguish between gas mantle lanterns and (standard) "Petroleumlampe" (flat-wick kerosene lamp).
And the "Petromax", which burns pressurized (with a hand pump) kerosene within the gas mantle is legendary ...
In Portuguese it is called "camisinha", little shirt, which later became a slang for "condom".
It's called 'gloeikous' in Dutch, which means the same thing.
German is the most literal language I think drax is german
Please heed the safety instructions! The lamps must be monitored during use. DO NOT light and walk away, as the flame increases as the lamp heats. I did this once, lit, turned flame very low, got distracted, smoke alarms went off and red flame was roaring out the top of the chimney.
The lamps are still used in rural areas, by the Amish, they tell me, and mantles, wicks and burner parts are sold in one local hardware. I collect them, they're fun to tinker with, a pain to trim the wicks, but fun to just turn off the lights and watch the lamp run.
I was raised with aladdin lamps, only 65 years old, we built home made diesel lamps for using while milking cows. My neighbour still doesnt have electric, his mother in her hundreds has moved to a house with electric but she was carrying coal buckets at 99, she couldnt start the generator so had to wait till her son got home, the generator would only run for a while at night. ( We installed electric in several farms when i was young). (In Scotland).
Lehmans in Kidron OH?
Norma,I am wondering if the old style Aladdin lamp idea with an incandescent mantle could be adapted to a mantle lamp that uses Bio Ethanol for fuel rather than Kerosene/Paraffin.
Ethanol burns much hotter than Methanol and carries far less toxicity issues with its use.
As far as wicks for burning Bio Ethanol are concerned I already use homemade wire filament wicks in small bottle type burners.
I think there may be some worthwhile experiments in adding an incandescent mantle.
@@windyfarmer.6095 I never had them as a kid but when I started going to rural areas in the 70's all the types were very common, flat, Dietz and Alladin and the Coleman types. I still have examples of all of them at the ready for the inevitable power failure and the occasional evening just for ambiance.
My grandmother had one in the 80s
as guy from africa I remember mantels we used to use them were I lived, thank you for the storie and knowledge my friend and I whish you a nice friday
"lute" means something like putty or cement... So I would interpret "forced my lute" as "It broke the seals on my still" (so pressure was building, becuase a gas originates from the heated coal and this gas could not be condensed, as the guy wrote before)... And it "broke my glass", so after he enforced the seals, the glass broke, because it couldn't hold the pressure...
You beat me to it. You're spot on
@@SonOfFurzehatt thanks. I only realized I was like 5 hours slower than everybody else 😅
Go to the very end of the video and turn on the captions.
Came here to say this.
Missed your post before I replied the same.
I'll never forget the first time I went camping in the 90s, and my dad lit up a Coleman lantern.
Damn near blinded me, and he said the trick is to set it up in a direction you don't need to look.
We'd toss a rope over a sturdy tree branch, hoist the lantern up to about 8 feet off the ground, and tie off the line.
It was like having a shop light in the woods!
The propane stuff will never beat the old multi-fuels
I had the same experience but my first camping trip with my dad was back in the 50’s.
We placed ours outside the tent several feet away and it was so nice knowing we'd see a shadow if anyone wandered by
@@no_peace quite frankly a light that bright would likely scare away anyone or anything because a human would probably come to the conclusion that if there is a light of such intensity the human that created it is probably still awake and an animal would see such a light and go I have no idea what's going on I don't want to know because I'll probably die if I find out I'm going to go the other way.
@@blockstacker5614 don’t tell Hank Hill!🤣🤣
The Coleman fabric mits reminds me of my childhood. Going camping using the propane lamp. I can still remember the hissing sound and bright light. The moths and other insects buzzing. The smell of the campfire.
"Lute" can be defined as "a clay or cement used for sealing a joint or coating a crucible." So, I imagine, in this case, "forced my lute" might mean the gas cracked the cement he used to attempt to seal the gas inside a container? Maybe indicating that the gas was under a lot of pressure somehow? Just a guess...
You’re pretty much correct, though exactly what he was using to seal the joints is unclear.
That's most likely what he meant. The distillation of coal has to be done in an air tight vessel, such as when they made town gas or coke or when burning wood to make charcoal.
Could he have meant to say he "came undone"?
The author was quite likely precisely describing what physically happened, but we are so used to these old-timey mechanical phrases being used for dramatic flair it is hard to hear it that way. Imagine an electrician working on a circuit and saying he blew his fuse; he would probably be talking about the actual fuse in his system.
This was my guess also. If you look at the retort, there is a hole in top to fit a stopper or additional fixtures. "Forced my lute or broke my glasses" sounds like, "popped my cork or shattered my retort."
I love how the stock footage of the guy writing with a feather quill is so obviously *NOT* someone who actually knows how to write with one. All the text on the page when the clip begins is clean and precise - his writing is full of blotches and thick drops. :-D
Then why don't you marry it?
@@trippmoore you're gonna find a lot of "um actually" people in these comment sections.
Came here to comment on the little kid writing stock video when the quill writing video concluded.
@@benjaminschwartz7616 surprised this hadn't been mentioned yet...
Well, obviously he was startled by the lighting phenomenon he just discovered.
I was like "damn this video is long" when suddenly the sentence came "we'll talk about this in the next video". Shows how well his content is produced.
You mean dragged out so one has to scroll thru to get thru quickly or not even bother watching anyway.
@@BurkenProductions Erm, what? ......... My content was supposed to say, that the length of the video just flew by, because those were some entertaining 30 minutes.
@@Marc_Fuchs_1985 he scored low on any reading comprehension test.
Excessive narcissistic prolixity imitating main stream media demented documentary narration.
@@BurkenProductions If you don't like the video then why would you torture yourself watching it?
I was blown away 20-30 years ago, taking the family camping, I picked up a Coleman propane lantern and had to figure out how to tie those little mesh bags onto the pipes. I could not believe how bright that thing lit up and never understood it. It was so amazing, it's stuck in my memory to this day. Finally, today watching your video I get it. Kind of. Thanks!
ain't yet watched entire video... Those mantles represent the first commercial use of rare earth elements/lanthanides . A number of the rare earth elements glow brightly at reasonably achieved temperature. Cerium and thorium especially I remember. Thorium was the best performer and no longer used today . A fresh mantle is a cloth impregnated with nitrates of the rare earths and a silicon based chemical perhaps ammonium silicate. After commissioning by burning the installed mantle in situ, the ammonium and nitrate components and cloth cellulose are volatiled away leaving the rare earth oxides within a newly formed silicate solid structure that has formed in the matrix of the previous cloth fabric with some 40% shrinkage .
They don't keep mosquitos away. I have experience with this too.
I’m always stunned by the fact that arc lights, literal LIGHTNING in a tube, was invented before bulbs that just needs to get a filament hot
Arcing electricity is easy. But Finding a filament that wouldn’t burn was far more difficult
.
everything is easy in retrospect. @@electrictroy2010
It is very easy to get a filament extremely hot for a couple of seconds. It's very hard to get it extremely hot for much longer. An electrical arc (especially one of the temperature needed to produce good light) will absolutely vaporize its electrodes over time as well, but it takes much longer for it to do so than it takes for a carbon filament to burn itself out in atmosphere. Even a tungsten filament will rapidly oxidize under the same conditions. The fact that filaments need to be quite thin in order to produce good light (due to light only being able to escape at the filament's surface) certainly didn't do them any favors either.
Gravedigging a 2 year old comment, but a lot of breakthroughs in history were discoveries of material science. Once you get something with a property you haven't had before, suddenly a lot of applications become possible. There's actually a theory that the tea culture in China held them back this way because it prevented them from discovering glass as they used porcelain pots and those were fine.
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 the version I have heard for the China theory, from an anthropological perspective, is more due to the fact that East Asia has a lot of clay that is really good for making high-quality porcelain, part of the reason that to this day many English speaking countries call high quality porcelain products "fine China" - the clay needed very little refining before it could be fired into a quite well made porcelain.
“Forced my lute” means the gas pressure broke the connection to glass collection vessel meant to condense the gas vapor distilling from the retort. Typically, the gas would condense into a liquid, but the temperature would not have been low enough to condense the gas from the coal, so the pressure built up and forced the connections apart.
Lute being a clay used to seal an airtight connection
I came here for this comment, and I still want to use it as a term akin to grinds my gears
@@Creationweek It's pretty close, basically just an archaic "blew a gasket"
lute2
/luːt,ljuːt/
Learn to pronounce
noun
noun: lute; noun: luting
liquid clay or cement used to seal a joint, coat a crucible, or protect a graft.
a rubber seal for a jar.
plural noun: lutes
Yep
"But here's a leaf blower" is going to be my consolation response from now on.
It was a very impressive demonstration
"I can't get you a kitten. But here's a leaf blower." I'm not sure it works in every situation, but results would be amusing nonetheless.
@@doggonemess1 And needless to say, that's all that's really important in this world.
I was born in 1947 in the USA. I am familiar with gas lights that were in my Grandmother's Victorian home. They were converted to electricity before I was born. I also remember outdoor kerosene lanterns that were used outdoors by road construction crews and railroads. I started collecting various bicycle, flat wick farm, railroad, and camping lanterns decades ago. Also have a few hollow wick lanterns and heater brass fuel reservoirs. My BSA Troop used Coleman white gasoline lanterns and camp cook stoves that had to be pumped up the be pressurized. The lamps were so bright that you could not look directly at them. Thank you for this walk back in time.
Here’s another interesting connection. When electric lighting was first being installed in buildings, they already had a route to run the wires: the gas pipes. The electric fixtures went up right where the gas fixtures had been, and the wires were pulled through the pipes that were already there. This way, electric conduit was “invented”.
ah! I didnt know that!
Source? If you've pulled wires through actual conduit you know how hard even that is. Pulling wires through gas pipe seems almost impossible; the elbows are too sharp and the pipe has most likely not been reamed at the ends. I call BS
@@pasad335 Thanks for the reply. I don’t recall the source; sorry.
You make a good point. I bet that the insulation could get stripped as the wire went a joint where the pipe ends were not reamed.
But still, it could have been how the practice got started. Then, subsequently, people figured that they needed to have tubing that is more suitable for wire; curvy bends and free of sharp edges.
One source: the Wikipedia article on electric conduit.
@@davidkantor7978 Yeah, interesting. I'm guessing some of the early gas piping was probably bent brass tubing. That could certainly work as electrical conduit.
5:20 There are "gasometers" in my train simulator. For years I could not figure out what these were or how to use them. After all these years, I finally know what one is.
Many interurban railroads were founded by coal gas companies in order to normalize a product of gasification of coal: electricity. If you could ride an electric interurban from Elgin to Chicago, you could safely put electricity into your house.
We have quite a few still in the UK - no longer operational but the structures are still there. They're all slowly being taken down & redeveloped which is for the best, but it is a shame to see the structures go
Which simulator do you use?
@@markwilliams2620 And now a good part of the former Elgin route is the Robert McClory and Skokie Valley bike trails. It was a lighter grade of rail than what Metra uses which is shared with freight.
@@roseroserose588 the redevelopment may be premature... if we are serious about moving to renewable gas they would be very useful.
The modern gas holder has a membrane inside an outer dome. The outer dome is inflated by air (like a bouncy castle) and always looks the same. The gas bag inside inflates and deflates with the gas level. If there's a gas leak, you can detect it in the "overflow" air of the outer dome.
The initial burn-off to "create" the mantle is truly fascinating. Great stuff!
I love this channeI so much
@@DyslexicMitochondria Hey bro i watch ur videoss. Love ur channeI
I was expecting to hear "carbon needs to be hotter to glow, as we see here as the soot is collected by the mantle".. as that was one of my first questions, why not use carbon mesh. It shows it so nicely, one of them glows, the other doesn't. You probably can't make carbon mesh to glow that brightly without using hydrogen and oxygen, or acetylen+oxygen.
As a Coleman guy I enjoy it too
@@squidcaps4308 A carbon mesh would just burn in the flame. The soot mostly burns, too.
IN the 1960s, there were power strikes in the UK for three hours at a time. I was staying with my aunt in London at the time, in an old house which still had working gas fittings in some rooms, although they'd not been used since the 1930s, when electricity had been installed. With some difficulty, I found a shop still selling gas mantles and fitting them enabled us to continue with gas lighting during the power cuts. It was a pity that the TV wasn't a gas one, too, but we did have a battery-operated radio!
1972, not the 1960s. I remember coming home from school, unlocking the front door and lighting the candle sitting on the table behind the door. It destroyed the Heath government and the next two general elections brought in a Labour administration until 1979. And I was a volunteer election worker in all those elections.
The power workers weren't on strike - it was the coal miners.
Now only a couple of percent - often less - of the country's electricity comes from burning coal. Because Thatcher (hawk, spit!) hated the miners.
I refuse to believe phlogiston is not at play here.
Gotta dephlogisticate that air somehow.
@@michaelathens953 YOU SHALLTH BE SOLD PHLOGISTEN!
phlogiston was a thing, when dodos & passenger pigeons existed. Like those, it too, is now extinct.
@@michaelmoorrees3585
phlogiston
/fləˈdʒɪst(ə)n,fləˈɡɪst(ə)n/ noun
a substance supposed by 18th-century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion.
I don't know, it sounds a lot like the magic smoke contained in electronics to me.
Next you'll be saying dark matter _isn't_ just scientific aether.
"... burns cleanly, and is green."
Thank you that was fantastic.
Looking forward to the follow-up video on the technology that makes it so green.
@@HadleyCanine copper dust in the glass?
I still haven't stopped laughing since Dietz Nuts and this just elevated it.
@@Sayntavian No pun could quite top that one.
@@HadleyCanine it’s kind of neat though not sure if it’s dedicated video worthy.
As memory serves though later called “Vaseline glass” it used to be called uranium glass. I’m sure you can guess why.
Indeed uranium glass was a thing, and yes it had uranium in it. Technically the process turned it into more of a ceramic glass. The uranium allows you to temper it at a higher temperature and gives it that opaqueness.
On second thought, it could be viable for a dedicated video. There actually is a lot to that process now that I sit and think about it.
I’m fascinated by anything which burns kerosene for energy, I have fridges, irons, stoves, heaters, but my favourite collection is over 200 Aladdin lamps from model 1 which was a brass body lamp through to the current glass models.
Here in Australia Aladdin revolutionised kerosene lighting with their mantle lamps for all the reasons you’ve mentioned and Aladdin lamps are still used in some Outback locations today. Electricity is sometimes impractical to supply to extremely remote locations, so kerosene is still popular, it’s cheap, can be easily bulk stored, more easily than propane, and it doesn’t need wind or sun to run, plus the non pressurised Aladdins are silent. Aladdins are expensive though, even today, particularly some of the rarer models collectors are interested in. My mother told me when she was a young girl growing up on the farm with no electricity and only kerosene wick lamps and candles for lighting, only rich folk could afford an Aladdin lamp!
Love the show.
PS I’ve spent hours trying to get Aladdin burners to burn more evenly, it’s almost impossible, particularly model 23’s. I like your theory about wick thickness inconsistency, never looked at that closely.
Steve from Aus.
I’m just curious, if exclusively used for lighting, wouldn’t a solar panel and battery and LEDs be much easier to use in Outback locations?
@@Conservator. Some folk certainly use battery power and solar in the outback and particularly in urbane areas, but some parts of the outback are extremely isolated, therefore kerosene is a more versatile option as it can be used by devices other than lighting.
Haven't you find the Genie yet?
@@Conservator. its hard to buy all of that when your poor, even if it saves more money in the long run.
@@acow9966 For the price of such a lamp you could buy a cheap solar panel, converter battery and led light. These lamps are very expensive.
I was born in a farm cottage that was lit with “Aladdin” lamps (mid-1950s)…if I remember correctly my dad converted a couple into electric table lamps (these were ones with metal fuel tanks, so he drilled holes in them to run cables). They even had lampshades because the original light from the mantle was so white and harsh.
Farm cottage , Yorkshire 1950s, great comfort in light & heat , also for carrying around the lambing fields ! The mantles were very fragile , like ash , and the light significantly brighter & more useful than a simple flame, The heat emitted was significant, but heated the room , and I think that some were adapted to heating a small cooking pan. Also I read that Thermo-couples were fitted to make electricity , long ago !
Omg! Criminal act !
On the other hand those "conversions" can be reversed, parts are available and "damaged" aladdin is cheap(er)
When I was a kid we used to use those Coleman lanterns all the time on hunting and camping trips. If I remember correctly, you never wanted to touch the mantle itself; if you did, it would just disintegrate into a fine powder when you touched it.
Same, apparently it was "petroleum naphtha" liquid fuel that had to be pressurized by hand for the first few minutes of operation. Then a generator of some kind used heat to keep the feed going. I was always getting in trouble for being too rough with it. Tying on new mantles took a bit of finesse.
@@frederf3227 Yup. You used to be able to buy "white gas" fuel (I've been told it was simply unleaded gasoline) at service stations. When I was a kid, every family camping trip started with a trip to the gas station to buy a gallon of lantern fuel. I remember my dad pumping up the fuel tank of the old Coleman lantern when the light started to dim. I prefer propane.
@@dstone1701 When I was a kid, my parents joined this cult up in the woods. We used a lot Coleman lanterns. I could never figure out the how and why of mantles. I think somebody gave me a really bad (and very wrong) explanation, but watching this video has clarified the science behind it.
@@dstone1701 This is the stuff. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha
It's the only thing we used in our Coleman lamps and stoves back in the 70's and 80's before the little propane cannisters became a thing. Before reading the Wiki page I had no idea it was the same thing as the 'lighter fluid' my dad used in his Zippo.
@@dstone1701 the white gas evaporates completely from your fingers and gear and doesn't leave a residue or smell. I prefer the white gas to propane as it's more energy dense, has lighter containers on account of not needing to be stored at high pressure, easier to see how much you have left and better for cold weather, but white gas is certainly fiddly with the pumping. On a nice summer daycamping trip, propane would be so much less trouble.
When the fragile mantle falls apart it's dismantled
Makes sense
Good one
And fills the room with radioactive thorium dust...
Oh thats soooo bad... totally necessary however, someone hadda say it! 😂
@@soundspark I've been using modern mantles that I thought were safe, turns out they have thorium after putting on my Geiger counter!
I realize I’m stating the obvious here, but dude, you have a gift. You can take topics which would normally be considered dry, boring, mundane, and make them RIVETING. I don’t know how you do it, but please keep doing it.
He's a really
good story teller.
He should do a video on rivets
There isn't such a thing as "boring topic". The people who make a topic feel boring, tend to make anything boring.
He makes it relevant.
This chap does have a knack.
This channel is an absolute gold mine of long form content for my autistic brain. Every video has such a consistent format and is SO well researched. You make the most random everyday objects super interesting
"He called it a gasometer."
That name annoys me.
"This name annoyed scientists."
I'm a scientist, confirmed.
I like the word gazomètre because the height of the cover actually gives a visible measure of how much gaz is in stock. And also because I'm french and this word looks far more french to me than gazofeet or gazoyard
We had a gasometer near us. The cylinder floats in water to make a seal. The more gas you have the higher the cylinder. This maintained a level pressure so I would say it could be classed as a Meter as it gave you a visual indication of how much gas you had left.
Samesies
We are all scientists on this blessed day.
I used to work in gas utilities. The gasholder / gasometer is dual function (although we referred to the locations as holder stations), town gas was produced around the clock and natural gas is transported likewise.
So local storage during low demand was needed as they function at relatively low pressure. Also release gas to the system during high demand, regulating pressure. They have become largely obsolete as the supergrid network can be over pressured for storage and exhausted gas fields can be re stocked. Yes putting gas back underground is a thing.
"it will be hard to show this on camera"
Immediately shows it very clearly on camera
He probably fiddled with the camera settings for a while before he got it to look good
“Under-promise, over-deliver” -Steve-O
I believe that's called gaslighting. You are told you won't see it, but yet you know you did see it?
Here's a leaf blower....
@@Timocracy Scotty
"someone asked for a simulated hurricane, I can't do that but"
-proceedes to do that
Lol I love this series, it's just the right amount of comical built into a very informative package to me.
I was expecting (hoping?) the lantern would slide out of frame. No no nonono.
I was hoping to see the leaf blower used on the Aladdin lamp.
I am familiar with hurricane lanterns and Coleman lanterns, but I never heard of the Alladin variant. I've always wondered about how mantles actually work and what they are made of despite my using them numerous times. Thanks for your thorough and interesting video.
Aladdin
I ain't yet watched entire video... Those mantles represent the first commercial use of rare earth elements/lanthanides . A number of the rare earth elements glow brightly at reasonably achieved temperature. Cerium and thorium especially I remember. Thorium was the best performer and no longer used today . A fresh mantle is a cloth impregnated with nitrates of the rare earths and a silicon based chemical perhaps ammonium silicate. After commissioning by burning the installed mantle in situ, the ammonium and nitrate components and cloth cellulose are volatiled away leaving the rare earth oxides within a newly formed silicate solid structure that has formed in the matrix of the previous cloth fabric with some 40% shrinkage .
Alladin, Coleman, Tilley, Primus, Optimus - they're just trade marks. Effectively doing the same job, but with *non-interchangeable* parts (jets, prickers, pump washers, seals ...) for "vendor lock-in" - which has been around since the Victorians.
The only reason the mantles are interchangeable is because the few *mantle* manufacturers don't want to sell 4 different product lines, and just make a one size fits all".
This is one of the best technology-related content in the entire internet. You have a gift for what you do. Thank you!
There are still a lot (about 1750, I think) of gas lamps in London. They're scattered around Westminster and the city. Others that look alike have been fitted with electric lamps.
A team of six people maintains them, which includes winding up the clockwork timer that opens and closes the valve. The mantles come from Germany.
Yes. And the city of Worcester still has them and very pretty they are.
San Diego CA has several gaslamps. No glowing mantles though. It’s just pure flame
.
@@electrictroy2010acetylene gas can give an intense Bright light .
For some reason I don’t trust this comment. I just get the feeling I’m being gaslit.
HEYO CHECK ME OUT!!
How clever is that pun?!
@@Biggles732 No. Acetylene burning in air gives a very yellow, VERY sooty flame. Which is quite nice - we used to use them for caving, under the nickname of "stinkies". (The calcium carbide used to generate the acetylene often had traces of calcium phosphide, which produced phosphine gas and a very distinctive smell.)
You are probably thinking of burning a mixture of acetylene gas pre-mixed with oxygen before being fed into the burner. Two gas bottles (or a generator and an air pump) feeding two hoses in one burner. Which *does* produce a bright blue flame.
What wonderful memories this brought back to me! My maternal grandparents lived in a stone cottage in rural North Wales and, in the 1950s, had no electricity. It was so restful sitting in the "living room" in the winter, with the coal range and an Aladdin lamp on the table producing enough light to read by even if not at the table. Even though the fire was usually kept low to save coal, unless you were boiling a kettle or baking in the small oven built into the range, the room was indeed kept warm by the heat from the Aladdin lamp.
At bedtime, you used an old-fashioned candle holder to walk down the narrow passageway to the bedroom, where it was much colder, and the candle was put out as soon as you were in bed, leaving you in total darkness.
I would not be upset if I was forced to live like that again, especially in such a beautiful part of Wales.
Same here, in NW Scotland, we only got connected to the grid in 1979 I believe. Great memories of the gentle hiss of a Tilly Lantern, and the incredible ,soft light that they produced. I am seriously considering going off grid again now, it’s funny how everything comes around…. I can still remember the smells of paraffin and methylated spirit- I was fascinated by the beautiful purple colour as a kid! 👌
@@supertramp6011 You couldn't afford the paraffin for the Tilly lamp. Near £12 for a 4 litre container locally in Ayrshire.
@@ianfraser8347 dang, that’s crazy! £3 a litre? What’s up with that?🤔
Interesting and informative video. I remember many years ago having a Coleman lamp with the bag shaped mantles like at 17 minutes. When new, you had to burn off some material that was blue if my memory serves me right. After that, they worked well, putting out a lot of light. The fuel it used was naptha.
You beat me to it by a day - 1 year after the video came out...!
I still have a couple my parents used when camping, when I was a kid. They still work but I always start them outdoors.
I have two of those old Colman lanterns. My dad bought them back in the 60's.
They are pressurised lamps
Some mantles (Coleman) are thoriated, meaning they are treated with thorium and are radioactive. The thorium increases the brightness.
I live in a part of California that loses power a lot so my family used to have a lot of lanterns in the cabin. I always loved when there would be a blackout because then our cabin would look like something from the 1800's, especially since my dad loves antiques. My favorite was always my little railway lantern, but when dad wanted to do some wood carving or something in the living room, he would light up one of those aladdin lamps and boy howdy did they glow bright! Thank you so much for this entire lantern series! It has been a blast to learn more about the history of these marvelous illuminators!
So I did a ton of undergrad research into lanthanides like the yttrium used in that mantle and I can say there is no catalytic reaction going on. What is happening is just that the correct fuel to air ratio is occurring and a non dirty flame is happening. That dirty kerosene smell that comes from the Dietz lamps is due to the candle not being able to burn hot enough with enough air to actually burn all the fuel. The aladdin lamp is providing both enough airflow and draft that the flame can get hot enough to burn cleanly.
Check out the brain on Kelsey!
Oh how I love a well stated, factual answer from somebody who obviously knows what they are talking about.
This is so incredible it basically matches what T.C. said, but more in depth
They are very, very, very slightly radioactive. Not at all dangerous, just enough radioactivity that you can demonstrate with an alcohol vapor chamber in a high school science class (they emit alpha particles which leave behind big, fat clouds of alcohol vapor).
@@TheCrewExpendable like my mother in law
22:15 the part where it shows how the carbon gets "cleaned" by burning it away was really cool.
Yeah, that part was fascinating and beautiful at the same time. Quite pleasing to see up close.
It is real similar to "burning out the carbon". This was a technique used in the 1940s thru 1970s to improve automobile performance and mileage. Slow driving results in low engine temps, which led to carbon build-up on valves and seats, thereby causing incomplete sealing and poor performance. Occasionally , we would take the car out to a straight stretch of road and drive as hard and fast as possible. This would burn the carbon build up off the valves, and the car would run better. The proof was all the black smoke that would roll out the tail pipes during the first run. And for all the smart alecks, who are going to say THAT was oil leaking around the valve seals? You're just wrong, and obviously too young to have "been there". And too sure of your own, obviously inadequate knowledge. I was there, being now 72yo, and I also have a Masters in Mechanical Engineering.
I bought my Aladdin lamp at a local hardware store about 15 years ago. I had been using propane fired gas lights in an older camping trailer and wanted the option of using a kerosene source. My brother had used an Aladdin lamp in his home 40 years ago which had a fixture which would allow him to hold a pan for cooking above the lamp. That provided an increase in efficiency, light and cooking, and enough heat to take the chill off the cabin on cool, but not too cold, nights. We had used Coleman lanterns fueled by white gas back in the 1950's, so we have used all 3 types of incandescent mantle lamps over the years. Although I still have all these lanterns, the great improvement in efficiency of LED lights and rechargeable batteries may mean that they will just be relics on the shelf as curiosities. This presentation provided some interesting history and details I had not been aware of.
"They preferred the term 'Gas-holder'"
I would have preferred Gasservoir
Yeah, the 2nd word always has to be a greek one (meter), and if not, then at least a french one (reservoir)... Or else, everybody will know, that you don´t take your business seriously...
In my youth, 1950s, we called them 'Gas Tanks".
If we are being pedantic a Gasometer was actually capable of measuring the volume of gas by virtue of measuring its radius and its height.
I would have called it Gas-Container.
Because it contains gas.
My vote is for gaservators the top of the reservoir floats on the gas and moves up and down according to the volume.
Gasometers were a part of my childhood (and deserve an episode of their own). They were everywhere in those days (50s and 60s) and you could while away hours and hours 'watching' them rise and fall (much like clocks, you knew they were doing it, but could never actually see them move!). The sections were sealed with water (or rather the lower sections were stored in a circular trench of water), so when they were full, the top section looked OK, but the lower sections got progressively more rusty. We had an old disused one outside our flat until quite recently (early 2000s), and I've not seen any others locally since it was dismantled, so it must have been one of the very last ones still standing. Although they were, of course, used for storing gas, their main use was to maintain a steady pressure in the gas main. A very simple answer to a very tricky problem.
Interesting... so in a way they did "measure" something. Not just the amount of gas currently inside, but also the relationship between the generation and usage rates.
Also, i think that turn-style electric switch could be traced to gas valves as well.
Indeed! Schivelbusch mentions this, and the earliest switches were quite bad for this reason. We didn't know yet that they needed to be clicky!
@@TechnologyConnections good thing there is a video out there to explain that very phenomenon!
@@TechnologyConnections We had clicky-turny switches in Czechoslovakia.
@@I967 My grandparents still have it in their cottage :) (only in few mostly unused rooms though)
Did the lamp have always on pilot
Fascinating stuff. As an old man now (b. 1954), I have seen some of this technology in use, and heard more about it from my father. When on holiday in caravans, we would use gas lighting with mantles. They tended to burn brighter the longer they burned, so you had to reduce the gas flow after a while. Eventually, the fragile ash mantle would fail, either due to the carbonisation you mention or because vibration in the caravan would fracture it. My father was raised in a house where the only source of lighting came from 'fish tail' gas lights. He took a candle with him when he went to bed.
The "Dietz nutz" joke from the previous episode still kills me
i still get a chuckle
@@technopoptart every time he says "Deitz" I start laughing.
I was trapped in a Las Vegas jail cell in Quarantine isolation with the Deez Nuts guy from Vine for 72 hours.
Now I don’t ever want to get famous
I notice that the "ties" that attach the mantles are now wire. They used to be asbestos string.
Mmh, cancer spahetti - tasty
Well if your mantle is going to contain a radioactive isotope you might as well add asbestos, because the customer is getting cancer anyway.
You can get them with string or wire. I still use string.
Thorium and asbestos. The past was a dangerous time
Asbestos is still in very wide use today in the US. It is just not used in residential settings, only certain industrial uses. And it is no more of an issue than gasoline is. Asbestos is perfectly fine as long as you don't create dust. Gasoline is perfectly fine as long as you don't let it create vapor.
This was the first experiment I taught to my Introductory Physical Science classes. Wood splints were heated in a test tube retort and it was observed that a new solid (charcoal), a flammable liquid (wood alcohol) and a flammable gas was produced. The wood could be decomposed into new substances, but not put back together. A great experiment raising many questions.
In my encounter with that as a student, the teacher used a cigarette instead of a wood splint. The stuff that came out of that served to make me a lifelong non-smoker.
My Grandparents had a cottage on an island from the 80's up to the early 2000's. Up until about '95, the whole place was powered with propane. Lights, stove, even the fridge, all propane powered. The water was pumped from the lake with a gasoline powered pump to a small water tower.
After the electric upgrade (which would be wildly expensive today), the stove remained propane, and one light, in a little corner with a comfy chair, and a perfect view of the lake, the perfect spot to curl up with a book, was left alone, it still works.
I have no idea what “forced my lute” means, but “broke my glasses” sounds as if the gas pressure built up inside his apparatus until it broke his glassware
Lute was a material used for sealing alchemical apparatus back in the day. So combined with the next phrase, I'm pretty sure he's talking about it actually breaking his equipment.
Yes, forced meaning raised the pressure... I agree.
Exactly. Too much pressure built up and if the Lute didn't pop the glass would break.
Look at what the internet produces. Different minds come together to solve mysteries. Also, tiktok...
My kids broke my lute, they smashed my violin.
As a technician, I was drawn here by the title and I found the content very informative and interesting. What fascinated me most is your use of and skill in English language. Not too common for a person covering this type of a topic. A master orator.
Agree he is a great presenter
What fascinates me is seeing a comment like yours. I find his style of presentation so grating that I quit the clip two minutes in, even though the topic's quite interesting. I have a severe aversion to the cheap gimmick of pretending that ideas are taking the speaker by surprise when it's obvious that they aren't; e.g., his way of mentioning that _retort_ doesn't mean another sense of the word, etc. It reminds me of a typical script from _Friends,_ i.e., makes me want to puke. Okay, it just makes me shudder, but either way, I don't watch anything presented in that style... and SpewTube is infested with it. Anyway, he's the very opposite of a master orator.
@@lucasgroves137 Wow, you apparently have some issues. I hope you find happiness.
@@Peter_S_ That's it, coo like a good pigeon. Don't you dare rock the boat.
@@lucasgroves137 🤣🤣🤣 Oh my.... Bless your heart.
He gets to the gas mantle just before the 11 min mark.
Thanks for the great educational video, and a huge thanks for not ruining it with crappy background music while you're talking. I don't know why some people are compelled to add annoying background music throughout the video.
When I was younger, the Coleman lantern was the choice for camp lighting. I recall a 21 year old intoxicated me grabbing a Coleman that "brewed up" in a friend's camp and setting it on a rock ledge outside where it could burn itself out safely.
It was a fun stay. Later that night we watched FB-111'S flying in and out of Plattsburgh AFB 20 miles away. The next morning, we were all recovering from the night before... eating eggs and rabbit hash out on the ledge when an A-10 flew up the valley. We were looking down at the pilot, who saw us waving and waggled his wings. Good times.
Your video was so much fun. I'm 66 and originally from the UK. When I was 5 my parents were really poor and we lived for a few years in an uncle's holiday cottage that didn't have electricity, so it was illuminated with gas mantles everywhere. This was before the advent of Methane/Natural Gas. One of the fun things you forgot to mention is that coal gas is heavier than air. So in the winter and if your house was sealed really well it could asphyxiate you and if you woke up and lit a candle it would blow the house and you to smithereens (lovely word). It had a distinctive smell much like essence of old engine oil, My parents reinforced the rule in both my sister and me that if we smelt it we were to yell and run outside. The only problem was that we always could smell it.
I can't wait for your next video and I'm assuming you have a Tilley lamp in the video. I have two for our power failure kit because they are staggeringly bright and only a bit explosive. They can run on all the kerosene derivatives (Jet A1 works particularly well) although red diesel seems to gunk up the tubes after a while. You would have to be mad to run a pressure vapour lamp on gasoline so I bought one of Coleman lamps but it definitely make me itch when it's running. The Tilley lamp is hilarious because you usually set fire to a small bath under the mantle of methylated spirits to pre-heat the lamp to get it up to temperature. Once it gets going though it's so bright you can illuminate a whole campsite.
I love how you lampshade and foreshadow what's coming next.
Thank you...I now understand what this gas mantle "thing" is. I encountered it as a concept for the first time today, and once I saw what new ones, ready to be used, look like, I was very confused as to how a fabric net bag became a helpful and desirable item once subjected to flame. GOT IT NOW. Much thanks, no more confusion. Very clever invention to improve the usability of the then-available technology.
Can you imagine people being smart and careful enough to use this in their homes now? Drivers have trouble nowadays simply remembering to turn the headlights on for their cars at night...
Thank you for explaining how my dad's old camp light worked. I swear, seeing the tiny mesh light up that brightly was basically sorcery.
"Gaslighting," "in the limelight," how many figures of speech are gonna suddenly make sense from this video?
gaslighting is specifically a reference to a play/movie called Gas Light in which an abusive husband uses manipulative tactics and denial to conceal the truth from his wife
@@littlesnowflakepunk855 gaslighting does not reference gas lights? 🌈
@@robertschnobert9090 the play references gas lights, in its name
@@robertschnobert9090 @littlesnowflakepunk The husband turns down the gaslights, then lies to the wife that the lights are the same. The origin is that he is making her doubt her sanity through manipulation of the gaslights
@@colem7173 and the lights dim, because he goes to the attic, searching for a "treasure", and the lights downstairs dim while he's using gaslight upstairs, causing the pressure to drop.
When I grew up the gasometers in the local town were quite visible and they had scales up the side so you could tell how much gas was in them so they were in affect measuring devices.
When the centre is high the container is full as the contents is used the container falls, the weight of the container pushing against the gas inside giving gas pressure in the pipes.
For anyone in Aus born before 1970 gasometers should not be a mystery.
Given that , even without measurements on the side, it's possible to gauge the amount of gas held at any time, "gasometer" is the most appropriate name for them.
Two massive units were astride the 405 Freeway in Long Beach, California -- for years.
They eventually became buffers for the adjacent refinery -- IIRC.
This was the same refinery that Cody Jarrett blew up in "White Heat."
He was atop spherical propane-butane tanks... a bad place to smoke.
They must be gone by now -- so old -- and sitting atop valuable land.
Occasionally a gasometer would blow up. I remember one did so in Copenhagen in the seventies causing great damage as domestic housing was built much too close.
Extremely interesting. Really appreciate bridging the gaps leading up to electric light. Your research and presentation ability, attention to detail and admission of imperfection in knowledge in some rare but understandable cases make your videos a true pleasure to watch. It amazes me how curious you are about such a wide range of topics.
"That's terrifying."
Not as terrifying as when you *_tipped over a kerosene lamp in your home._*
I did it for you!
@@TechnologyConnections and we're grateful
@@TechnologyConnections Yeah, that's what the maid said to Damien just before the hung herself in the foyer...
He replied to me! Mom, did you get that on camera?!
I need to watch that video now!!!
The end was disturbing, the rest was lit.
You take my thumbs up and get the heck out of here... good day sir!
Slow clap!!!!
you're not wrong!
I need a counter for how many times he said we’d talk about something later
It's a humungous topic! 🌈
I'll get you one later.
@@JohnMichaelson giggle snort
The most impressive thing is that 2/3 things he really ended up talking about
It's like Alton Brown and, "But that's a topic for another episode."
You've done it again! This is the second video of TC that I've watched and like the first, it is so entertaining and educational, both at the same time. You're such a natural explainer of complicated things.
Missed opportunity, they could’ve called "gasometers" "gassholes".
calling something -(o)meter while it is not a measurement apparatus is the closest thing from scientific terrorism there could ever be 😅
@UC8qWIA7WaG4fU0yuFY4YUHg However, it is still not its primary purpose. A voltmeter exists primarily to measure electricity; a gasometer CAN measure the contents in it, about as much as a glass of sufficiently standard size CAN measure an amount of water volume in it (if you use it repeatedly, anyways).
@@Lapantouflemagic0 The design of these reservoirs gave an indication of how much the vessels contained.
You do realise the sides raised and lowered under the system pressure.
When full, all side rings were raised (sealed at base and top of each segment, by water in a trough), when empty walls lowered to ground level. A metal framework that guided the concertina like walls didn't collapse, giving an indication of capacity.
So yeah, not a 'scientific instrument', but neither is an uncalibrated galvanometer or voltmeter, but the suffix meter is appropriate.
@@wallabra I think the reason it's called a gasometer is because it provides a metered (or controlled/ measured) flow of gas.
I think it was also to troll scientists, though.
@@BTW... to be honest i had absolutely no idea whatsoever of what those things looked like. looking into it i see you're right, but those are still primarily storage devices
still, a gasometer in any reasonnable understanding should not be a buidling
And thus 'forced my lute' become a popular phrase in the 2020's
or maybe telling someone to stop trying to force my lute.
"you may not like what i have to say but trying to force my lute isn't going to change my mind."
their confusion over what you just said should buy you enough time to make a quick egress.
‘Stop posting thirst traps or I’m gonna force my lute.’
If the guy talking about a lute being a clay seal on a crucible, then us taking this phrase on as an expression for frustration will make for some wonderful reading on an encyclopaedia one day.
Let's do it.
As long as the lute consented.
If this doesn't become a thing, it's really going to force my lute.
Cool video. When I was in the Canadian Forces from 1980 -1997and I was posted to Comox BC in 1991, one of my secondary duties was as a member of the Nuclear Emergency Response Team (NERT). When training with the equipment to used to detect and locate radioactive material, we used live Radioactive material and of course a much safer training material. That training material was the new (unburnt) Coleman mantels for the lantern which worked well as a training aid.
I use a Coleman "white gas" lamp while camping. I grew up around these lamps. I remember my dad taking the lamp and pumping it to pressurize the tank. My dad used to pull out the mantle after the old one would get a hole.
"No, that was correct, why did you stop" has to be one of the best outtakes I have ever heard
I do appreciate more and more the cleverclogs concept of the mantle, and the entertainment factor of alarming people with a roaring geiger counter never gets old, I still forever associate them with the seared-in memory of being utterly blinded by that hissing nightmare on camping trips. "Enjoying all those stars? Here lets light up the GODDAMN SUN right at eye level"
indeed. In boy scouts, they had them on long poles attached to propane tanks like you'd find in a gas grill. And they had 5 of them for the main area, obliterating your night vision so you'd find every ankle-busting root on the way back to your tent....
“and we'll cover that in the next video”
Damn cliffhanger endings
As a collector and restorer of old Coleman lamps it was a sad cliffhanger indeed.
@@Juggernath I stil have my familys old pump lantern.
My dad took me gigging with a tilley back in the day. Then I took it up with my friends using a gas lamp. Then a halogen H4 and a car battery. Now you could probably just use a key chain LED.
Next up Tilley lamps...
I've watched too many Morrowind memes and thought that said cliffracer
I like seeing how things are invented and created. And it just shows people new how to do it from way before they just never pressed on to actually master it and obtain utility.
That is why I believe we are more advanced than we think, and we need to discover less and tie more ends to get what we want.
Some of my fondest memories from childhood are watching my dad change the mantles on our Coleman lantern before heading out to 'the land' for a hunting weekend. And then the gurgling hiss of the lantern lighting up our entire campsite from pitch black. Good times.
In my early 1900's built house, they literally pulled two wires through the gas light pipes when they converted the room lighting to electric.
That's interesting. I had a house in Scotland that still had some old lead gas pipes in the walls for lighting but they were only about 1/4" inside diameter.
This was true of a lot of street lighting, too, at least in London.
@@Phiyedough Yes... our house in Los Angeles was built in 1914 and had gas light fittings in every room. Electrical wiring was installed later, obviously. As a young kid, I wondered why the gas outlets were so high. Of course, they were for gas lamps. The house is still there and probably still has the hidden gas pipes running through every room (of course, empty).
Well, guess that's one way to retrofit knob and tube wiring lmao
I have a lamp which was originally a gas lamp. It was converted to electric and the wiring runs through the remaining gas fitting on the base of the lamp. Had my brother (owns hundreds of kerosene lamps) not told me, I would never had known it wasn't originally electric.
"the limelight"
So *that's* what that means! 😆
Just makes me think of the song by Rush...
@@bsperoz well the song was written under the same assumption, it's about living a life on stage, as a celebrity or other public figure who would be in the literal limelight
Hm, I always thought it was the universal dream...
...for those who wish to seem.
@@TacoBurrit0 Well, I wouldn't argue against you on it. Let's put aside the alienation and get on with the fascination.
This guy summed up hours of knowledge in 30 minutes give this guy a Nobel
That was excellent. I'm almost 66 and I had never heard why mantles glowed so brightly and what they actually are.
Gas lights is where we get the phrase “TURN the light on”. As you said, there were valves; not switches. Thus, you really don’t “turn” on an electric light, but the term had been established and just stuck.
The early electric light switches were also rotary…
@@allangibson2408 Because they were just repurposed gas valves.
@@erinfinn2273 No - electric switches and gas valves are wildly different. The designers wanted to maintain familiarity however.
Wiring was however run through the old gas pipes - which is why American electrical conduit still uses pressure tight threads.
The other power source in most cities was water - the hydraulic power systems continued in service until the 1960’s running lifts. The hydraulic power pipes in London were repurposed in the 1980’s for fibre optic cable runs.
@@allangibson2408 I guess what I meant was that the interface was just repurposed. I do know the mechanical differences between gas and electric switches. You just said what I wanted to say clearer.
Edit: I made that post when I was very tired. I mean no disrespect to anyone's intellect. Also, didn't know about the municipal hydraulics system. That's cool.
Picrew avatar detected
Wow. It took me 33 years to realize why natural gas is called natural gas. I can't thank you enough for your well researched and very educational videos.
I always thought it was a marketing ploy : o
@@felixmervamee7834 Actually -- it WAS.
What is here described as 'coal gas' was rarely so named.
Instead, the terms: 'city-gas' ( the stuff was never seen outside of cities ); 'manufactured gas', 'lighting gas' were much more common.
If you roll back through old Hitchcock horrors -- one scene stood out -- a murder victim is held -- head first -- into an oven.
In the scene, the pilot lamp has been put out by the murderer -- and the audience is left squirming as the event goes on and on.
The murderer is holding his head to the side -- while the poor victim is forced to inhale carbon monoxide.
This ultra nasty reputation IS what the new term was contrasting against.
You'll find other, similar scenes, from crime dramas dated back in time, the era before natural gas.
Natural gas took off when the Texas Railroad Commission compelled oil companies to gather it -- not flare it -- as had been the custom.
This was resisted -- at first -- until it became idiot obvious that said natural gas could be sold in a big way to ammonia plants...
facilities that weren't too far down the road.
( The US government paid for massive plants to generate ammonia => nitric acid => explosives during WWII.)
Until then, natural gas had no market. Retail consumption was nil.
When the war ended, the industry had to find new buyers -- and soon did.
My outing club owns a cabin in the woods that's off the electric grid. They get big bottles of propane delivered once a year and use that to run gas-powered heat, lights, and stove. I had to replace the mantles on the gas lamps a couple times, and we were trained about how incredibly fragile they were. I never quite understood how they worked, and now this all makes so much more sense!
I love how this channel always makes me wanna buy useless things.
I'm not for sale, damn you!
More like "formerly useful"...and possibly useful again after an apocalypse.
Things don’t become useless when something better comes by, only less viable.
I was going to say it's not useless, but I thought about it, and I agree that it would mostly be a novelty purchase with minimal utility. I'm sure it does it's job very well, but it's unlikely that it would be useful in practice. I think I'd salvage car batteries, voltage regulators, and LED lights from dumps before I tried to weave itrium salt cotton thread mantles for the one Aladdin kerosene lamp I've been hanging onto throughout the apocalypse.
These lamps are extremely useful when the power goes out.
And it goes out more and more often for more and more reasons as the days go by.
imagine a comeback so savage that it distills coal
I remember the Thorium nets. We had a lamp with one when I was a kid and used it on all our camping trips. My father, then a physics teacher, had access to a Geiger counter and just for giggles he brought it home and pointed it at the lamp. The noise that followed was quite scary. We didn’t stop using it though. Different times. 😳
Yep! My dad would sometimes bring us to his cabin near his little hobby apiary. There was no running water or electricity, so we'd use this kind of lamp with a propane bottle. I was very fascinated by the glowing fabric and he'd always tell me to not touch the mantle, said that it'll give me cancer. That was 15 years ago.
My dad was a doctor. We lived in the south and the mosquitoes were fierce. Back then, mosquito repellents weren't very effective. He made a mosquito repellent that worked perfectly. Just apply it liberally all over your body and you never got a single bite. It was kerosene and sevin mixed together. Amazingly, I'm still alive and in good health. He was quite aware of the risks but insisted that it was still healthier than getting 100s of bites every day.
Thorium goes through alpha decay, so it's not that dangerous as long as it's outside of your body. It becomes dangerous when you accidentally inhale or swallow the radioactive dust particles, which is a real possibility with a mantle.
It's notTHAT dangerous for the user, as long as you don't let the pieces of the mantle get into you (harder than it sounds, as it's basically ash, but not that hard...)
It's the manufacturing (especially back when nobody knew anything about radioactivity, and dumped thorium waste like it's nothing) that's the real trouble. Some of the old gas mantle plant sites are still being decontaminated.
Back in the day (the 1970s), we went camping with a Coleman lantern that had two of what we always called 'booties', and I remember they were considered to be VERY fragile and at the time I remembered them to be radioactive in some way.
I remember we had a celling lamp in our mountain cabin in Norway utilizing gas mantle back in the 80s. I do recall they was expensive and a massive upgrade on normal parafin lamps we had in the rest of the cabin.
Thanks for the entire series of fantastic videos.
Am I the only one who:
1. wasn't using gas lanterns before 🔦
2. understands and digests all the information we are being given about how they are no longer the best option 💡
3. and yet now finds them romantically appealing and wants to start using them perhaps in limited capacity? 🏮
I can't be the only one feeling that, right? 😉
Only until you start suffocating in fumes and sweating twice as much because of the heat they emanate. 😅
Play safe with them, Mr. Pentest! But hell yeah they have a great aesthetic
Nice to see Deviant watches the same stuff I do! lol. I've never known anything about Lanterns before this series, but now I have a ton of useless info to spout to others. btw - I hope to see you speak in person sometime, I enjoy your sessions and have learned ALOT from them. (Senior Cyber Security Lead/Architect at a fortune 500 company here)
You the original Deviant Ollam?
@@maybearkamaybenot11 You could always look at his youtube account, based on the consistency of uploads and subscriber account he's either the actual Deviant Ollam or a very dedicated fake.
"The good old days", when open flames (candles, oil lamps and openly burning gases) was "safe" for home use.
We had candles on our Christmas tree when I was a kid. Never burned anything down. Also in the 1950s owners manual for your car told you how to adjust the valves, today they tell you not to drink the contents of the battery. Says it all.
@@D-B-Cooper They also still performed lobotomy and doctors prescribed cigarettes.
@@jimdabarbarian doctors have now switched to vaccines to do that.
@@D-B-Cooper Careful, he might talk about the viability of injecting 5g signals through needles one day.
You can use open flame if you are used to it. You pay attention to it.
I run an isotope handling course at a university, one of my props (among many) to demonstrate the response of the contamination monitor is a thoriated gas mantle. They certainly send the Geiger tubes crackling.
Holy crap I remember all of these mechanics from my childhood- new mantle is flexible, the initial burn in, then its fragile- and most of all, do not touch that glass if it goes out after an hour. Really cool man.
They removed thorium from lantern mantles?! How's a boy scout supposed to make a breeder reactor now?
the older thorium mantles are brighter and tend to be more durable...that's the controversy.
you laugh, but old gas mantles are also used in radiological event training as samples of radioactive material.
I was especially excited for this episode. My parents used to take us camping when we were young and we had one of those propane-bottle & wick lamps. It was always this mystical beast, being a combination of very powerful but also quite fragile. I was very excited to finally learn how it all worked.
Where I live we have naphtha lanterns for camping, I remember asking "what happens if we touch the wick while it's on?" The answer I got was "not only will you disintegrate the wick, but you'll also severely burn your finger."
I remember camping as a child in the 80s, and our propane lamps had a single wick in the middle, and a portable propane cylinder underneath. Larger than the one in the video, but smaller than a BBQ gas bottle.
I have both propane and gas lanterns. I mainly use the propane lantern though. I just bought a tree to put on my 20lb tank that the lantern can sit on top. Much cheaper to refill the 20lb tank than keep buying the little 1lb canisters plus the tree lets me connect my propane stove to it too. I also have an old 3 burner gas stove that has the propane conversion kit, which is just a pipe with a threaded end for the propane to connect to. Nothing else had to be changed other than to remove the gas tank.
@@jasonantes9500 So confusing reading the word gas in this context. My use of it was as a synonym for propane/butane, aka liquefied petroleum gas, LPG for short.
We (Australia) understand the abbreviation gas for gasoline, in context with American cars, but our cars that run on gas use LPG or autogas.
So my BBQ gas bottle referred to above was an 8.5kg LPG cylinder.
@@jemsterr Yeah, different parts of the world different vernacular. Yes, my use of gas is short for gasoline. I could have said dual fuel too I suppose. Anyway, cheers!
In Vienna there where some big "gasometer"'s that are now repurposed, but when they where holding has you could tell by how high or low the containers held by the structure where how full they where
I believe there are some in London that have been converted to fancy apartments
As he said gasometer i instantly thought of the eventhall or what ever it is, called "wiener gasometer" in vienna.
@@alexe8375 well, the frames were moved to the other side of the canal and fancy apartments were built inside them. The material that actually held the gas was far too toxic to reuse.
There existed in my city, a gasometer, until about 10years ago. It was a 'listed' building. It was not actually in use. Then they decided to use the land for a supermarket. The telescopic dome floated on water which acted as a seal, and it expanded as gas was added.
there was one in my city that they tore down in 2013
Finally, an explanation of the mantle! I have a vivid memory from my childhood of finding an old lamp like this, removing the glass, and touching the mantle. It crumbled and I was beyond confused, having thought it was a cloth of some sort.
ain't yet watched entire video... Those mantles represent the first commercial use of rare earth elements/lanthanides . A number of the rare earth elements glow brightly at reasonably achieved temperature. Cerium and thorium especially I remember. Thorium was the best performer and no longer used today . A fresh mantle is a cloth impregnated with nitrates of the rare earths and a silicon based chemical perhaps ammonium silicate. After commissioning by burning the installed mantle in situ, the ammonium and nitrate components and cloth cellulose are volatiled away leaving the rare earth oxides within a newly formed silicate solid structure that has formed in the matrix of the previous cloth fabric with some 40% shrinkage .
I hope this series continues onto safety lanterns used in mining for some years. I believe they have a 'flame arrester' to prevent them from causing explosions.
Now you're wandering into Davy lamps.
Early carbide fueled miners lamps basically produced and burned acetylene
they basically had a fine mesh that when the methane entered through it into the lamp it would safely burn without spreading the flame outside of the lamp. I'm not so sure on the physics of why that occurs but it does.
@@A.Martin It was demonstrated at the Royal Institute by Humphry David who invented the lamp. The way it works is that the screen is small enough to let combustion gasses through but not the flame front. The original filter was a bundle of tiny tubes that formed the screen which cooled the flame front to below combustion temperature so no flame could progress to other side of the filter. Think of a bundle of drinking straws but shrunk down by 80% and made out of brass. It was eventually refined by using a stack of woven brass screens with fine brass wire and each screen was spaced about a quarter of an inch apart. If you look at a miners lamp there's a large collar that looks like a hood above the light glass. The filter is housed in that hood.