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Updated: June 18, 2025
I recalled a night I once spent in a Bowery lodging-house for "local colour." Only this was infinitely worse. No law regulated this house. There was an atmosphere of cheerlessness that a half-thickened Welsbach mantle turned into positive ghastliness. Our guide introduced us. There was a dead silence as eight eyes were craftily fixed on us, sizing us up. What should I say?
Welsbach calls this his "mantle;" and by a simple arrangement he fits it on a Bunsen burner, and places an ordinary lamp chimney over it. When the flame is applied, the "mantle" becomes incandescent, and gives out a brilliant yellow light, which, it may be said without exaggeration, will compare favorably with any electric light yet put on the market.
The whole apparatus can be got ready to fit on an ordinary gas bracket; and two or three spare frames with "mantles" can be kept in the house in case of accident. Whoever sees the Welsbach incandescent light in operation will readily admit that it is the "coming light." It has beauty, brilliancy, purity, and economy all on its side.
But within, where it was already night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights, which showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival, began the day before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious observance.
Mr. McCrae was strongly opposed to any discussion being raised in regard to the question being considered in its financial aspects. They, as gas engineers, did not require to trouble themselves with the doings of investors. He regarded the Welsbach burner as an improved appliance for consuming gas.
That the soft thick pile under his feet would wear for twenty years, and that the Welsbach incandescent mantles on the chandelier saved thirty per cent, in gas-bills while increasing the light by fifty per cent.: it was these and similar facts which were uppermost in his mind as he gazed round that room, in which every object spoke of solid, unassuming luxury and represented the best value to be obtained for money spent.
To make a comparison between electric illumination and incandescent gas burners, such as the Welsbach burner, you must figure on the use of an arc lamp in the electric circuit instead of an incandescent lamp, which is certainly fair when it is remembered that incandescent gas burners are, as a rule, used in places where arc lamps should be used if electric illumination is employed.
In another five minutes he was fighting hard against a mad impulse to propose to her on the spot. And then the fight was over, and he had lost. He proposed to her under the rose-coloured shade of the Welsbach light. She drew away, as though shot. And with the rapidity of lightning, in the silence which followed, he went back to his original criticism of himself, that he was a fool.
He argued at some length against the financial aspects of the scheme which was being promoted to buy up the Welsbach patents, and to introduce the lamp into this country. His advice to his friends was not to have anything to do with the Welsbach company, and, as investors, to be very careful in accepting all the statements made about the light, which he predicted would not be a financial success.
All the great improvements in gas, the introduction of water gas, the economizing in consumption by the use of the Welsbach burner, have all been made within the time of those before me, and yet, notwithstanding that when these gas improvements started, the electric lighting business was hardly conceived, and certainly had not advanced to a point where you could claim that it had passed the experimental stage notwithstanding this, the cost of electrical energy has decreased so rapidly that to-day there are many large central station plants making handsome returns on their investments at a far lower average income per unit of light than the income obtained by the gas company in the same community.
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