Even today one can find Victorian style gas lamp shades in people’s homes, or in lobbies of fancy hotels. The reason for their endurance even some hundred years after their formal replacement by electrical lighting is due to two factors. One, they still hold appeal as part of the trend of returning to Victorian era style. Two, they are just as functional for electrical bulbs as they were for gas flames.
The Victorian era glass shade spread during Queen Victoria’s reign of Great Britain; however, the origins can be placed further back to the invention of the first controlled gas lighting device. In the late 18th century in Great Britain, an inventor named William Murdoch became the first man to try hooking up a gas supply with consistent flow rate to fuel a gas flame.
At the time, he worked in a steam engine company, working on coal mining technologies. In his spare time, he tried manipulating coal gas for lighting.
His initial forays involved hooking up both his own residence and the buildings of his employer. He designed and fashioned lamps himself, and fascinated the generation’s onlookers who came from all over town to gawk. Likewise, his coworker Samuel Clegg was amazed by the sight so much that he quit his position at the company to start up a gas light firm.
However, Clegg and Murdoch were far from the only ones to conduct such experiments. A German by the name of Friedrich Winzer was also recorded to have had patented a type of gas-fired lamp a few years later. Similarly, a Frenchman by the name of Lebon created some gas-fired lamps for decorating his house. Paris was soon to be overtaken by the gas lamp craze.
The impact of the first city-wide lights is hard to overstate. City-mandated lights meant that streets could become highly usable even in the evening hours, extending hours of commerce and travel. In addition, the streets became much less hospital to criminals who found it harder to commit crimes in the glare of the gas lamps.
The benefits of gas lighting were not limited to the streets. When installed indoors, factories found that they could extend the hours of their workers. Moreover, the decorating of homes with novel glass lamp shades meant the development of a new industry aimed at artistic and interior design.
The earliest home shades used glass as the raw material. Glass was highly malleable and could be shaped into different kinds of profiles. These shades were also characterized by stylistic etchings on the outer surface. The basic shape was a globe to shield the gas-fired flame, and a round opening on the top to release heat.
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