The Pitner Gasoline Lighting Co. was based in Chicago, Illinois, and was much better known for its hollow wire lighting systems than it ever was for its free standing pressure lamps. There does not appear to be very much documented evidence in the UK regarding Pitner, but an American book published in 1906 contains many testimonials and photographs of installations dating from several years earlier. The company, headed by Marion Pitner, became chartered as an Illinois Corporation in April 1904, and because it was inviting customers to investigate its financial standing as early as 1906, the suggestion is that it was trading for a fair while before that date. One quaint but pertinent paragraph reads:
"It is our intention to give herein ample evidence of such indisputable character that anyone can, by reading this book carefully and giving due credit to its contents, satisfy himself beyond any doubt that the Famous Pitner Lighting System is not a substitute for gas or electric lighting but is superior to either and is not to be classed with other gasoline lighting devices that almost everyone has seen or heard of."
How long does it take to become "Famous"? The suggestion has to be that Pitner had been in the business a long time. The book goes on to refer to "thousands of satisfied and delighted customers" so strengthening this suggestion. There is also some evidence to suggest that Pitner did not advertise in the public media, probably did not advertise at all, but instead relied upon testimonials for their business.
Some of the lighting methods described in the 1906 book include (1) open flame gasoline torches, as commonly seen around circuses, fruit stands, etc, (2) the carburetor, where gasoline was stored in a tank equipped with a weight or spring driven blower. Air which had been passed over the liquid gasoline was piped through the building, as a flamable gas.
Individual gravity lamps (3) came next, with the under-generator model where the gasoline was vapourised below the burner by a flame separate from the lighting flame, and the over-generator, where only the heat from the flame was used to vapourise the fuel.
The book goes on to describe (4) the "Individual Arc Pressure Lamp" but it gives no maker. It is interesting to read the Pitner claim that filling each one and pumping them up to 40 or 50 pounds pressure was inconvenient, and that the needle cleaning valve was always causing trouble. Also "The danger of having the supply so near the mantle soon caused the people to abandon their use." How wrong they were eventually proved to be. Next in Pitner's chronology comes (5) the Gas Machine, which gets quite a technical argument as to why it is unsatisfactory, then finally the Famous Pitner Lighting System has its day. "The invention and perfection of The Famous Pitner Lighting System is beyond doubt the most important invention to users of artificial light since the introduction of the telephone." The Pitner system required reservoirs to be filled daily, and took fuel from the bottom rather than the top of the tank, so it claimed to avoid the problems of fraction separation which dogged other makes.
Ironically, after criticising the Arc Lamp so strongly, Pitner went on to manufacture a large table lamp which was almost identical in principle to the Hydro-Carbon Company Air-O-Lite of about 1912. The similarity was so great that it prompted Coleman Historian Herb Ebendorf to comment "I wonder who was copying who!". The Pitner parlour lamp below is without doubt a very high quality product. This particular specimen, found in Canada, is in such superb condition that at first I thought it must be recent, in spite of the style, but Anthony Hobson, author of "Lanterns that Lit our World" reports in his book that Pitner ceased trading in 1916. It seems that these parlour lamps were individually numbered, and the book of instructions which accompanied each lamp was marked with the same number as the lamp.
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