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Welsbach Gas Light Company lantern slides, postcards, and bulletins
Notifications
Held at: The Historical and Interpretive Collections of The Franklin Institute [Contact Us]222 N 20th St, Philadelphia, PA, 19103
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the The Historical and Interpretive Collections of The Franklin Institute. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
Overview and metadata sections
The Welsbach Gas Light Company was in operation in Gloucester City, Camden County, New Jersey from the late 1890s through 1940. The company had the exclusive manufacturing and selling rights for the Welsbach mantle, an incandescent gas mantle used for street lamps, invented by Austrian scientist and inventor Carl Auer von Welsbach (1858-1929).
A subsidiary of United Gas Improvement Company, Welsbach was the center of production for gas mantles in the United States. Welsbach Company's facility in Gloucester City ceased manufacturing gas mantles in 1940 and closed sometime in the mid-1940s. The Company was acquired in 1971 by Jamaica Water Supply and the two companies merged in 1974. In 1995, the firm reorganized as EMCOR Group Inc. As of 2016, Welsbach Electric Corp. exists as part of EMCOR Group and is based in New York, New York.
Bibliography:
Welsbach Electric Corp. "History." Accessed September 2, 2016. http://www.welsbachelectric.com/about-us/history/
Welsbach Gas Light Company lantern slides, postcards, and bulletins, circa 1890-1911, consist of lantern slides showing the production of gas mantles and fixtures, various rooms in the Gloucester City factory and laboratory, and employees; a series of postcards, 1908, showing black and white images of the factory, its equipment and laboratories, and its employees at work; and company bulletins. The bulletins are compiled in one bound volume consisting of sixteen bulletins and papers relating to the incandescent gas lighting industry published by Welsbach, 1908-1911.
Gift of Welsbach Gas Light Company
Summary descriptive information on this collection was compiled in 2014-2016 as part of a project conducted by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to make better known and more accessible the largely hidden collections of small, primarily volunteer run repositories in the Philadelphia area. The Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories (HCI-PSAR) was funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This is a preliminary finding aid. No physical processing, rehousing, reorganizing, or folder listing was accomplished during the HCI-PSAR project.
In some cases, more detailed inventories or finding aids may be available on-site at the repository where this collection is held; please contact The Historical and Interpretive Collections of The Franklin Institute directly for more information.
Organization
Subject
Place
- Publisher
- The Historical and Interpretive Collections of The Franklin Institute
- Finding Aid Author
- Finding aid prepared by Sarah Leu and Anastasia Matijkiw through the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories
- Sponsor
- This preliminary finding aid was created as part of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories. The HCI-PSAR project was made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- Access Restrictions
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Contact The Historical and Interpretive Collections of The Franklin Institute for information about accessing this collection.