Word: lamps
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About the time Communist Karl Marx finished writing Das Kapital, Capitalist Charles Pratt began selling "Pratt's Astral Oil." A high-grade lamp fuel, refined in Brooklyn from Pennsylvania petroleum, it became world-famed. Until Edison made his improvement, no one could read the Communist Manifesto, or anything else, under a mellower light. Onetime grocery clerk Pratt eventually joined up in Standard Oil with onetime bookkeeper Rockefeller. When he died in 1891, Pratt was Brooklyn's richest citizen, a solid, sharp-faced, goateed, philanthropic Baptist. To his six sons and two daughters he left an 800-acre estate...
...live with bits of this and that, to manage eggs from wrongly fed and badly housed chickens, to scrape and tan animal furs for family use, to wash and spin wool, with homemade soap and homemade spinning wheel, to finish the winter evenings by the light of a potato-lamp (with its improvised wick set in melted fat in a hollowed-out potato!). The effort is sure to leave him with the greatest indifference toward the "literature of despair...
...Western Union's Long Island laboratory, a new kind of lamp was shining last week. It might not be the biggest, the brightest or the most economical, but designers and users of optical instruments were excited about it. Reason: its light came from a speck of molten metal only three one-thousandths of an inch in diameter...
Western Union calls its lamp a "concentrated arc." Inside a small glass bulb filled with argon gas are two electrodes. On one is a tiny speck of zirconium oxide. When the current flows, this turns to molten zirconium metal, glows ten times as brightly for its area as the brightest tungsten filament...
...lamp did some startling tricks. The shadows it cast across a 40-ft. room had sharp, un-fuzzed edges. When the smallest model using only two watts of current was held behind a color film the size of a postage stamp, it projected a clear, sharp "shadow picture" as big as a telephone book. When used in an ordinary photographic enlarger, it made monstrous enlargements of startling clarity...