The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

For those of you who do not frequent Shorpy's website, there is an interesting photo posted today of a crowded shop filled with bikes and phonos... what a combo!! Looks like primarily disc players on the left (Is that a Victor Junior?) and a wall of nothing but brand new cylinders on the right! Where's a time machine when ya need one!

http://www.shorpy.com/

1912 is well past the gas light era. They look like
electric fixtures anyway.

Skihawx wrote:1912 is well past the gas light era. They look like
electric fixtures anyway.

Not necessarily. I dont know about Detroit, but out here the changeover from gas to electricity was fairly slow & irregular. Even in the 1920s, gas was still being connected to city homes as the main source of lighting. I've got a Lassetters catalogue (similar to Sears in USA) from 1911, and gasoliers were being offered alongside electroliers. House interior photos from the teens & twenties often show rooms with gas and electric light fittings, because electricity was fairly unreliable and gas was used as the back-up system in major rooms.

If you look closely, you can see a reflection of the flash powder igniting. Also, the front mount phonographs have a ball on the end of the horn replacing the reproducer to protect the turntables. It also looks like some of the equipment is used and not new.

Great photo. I have become addicted to the Shorpy website, and check it out almost daily. I have learned a lot from studying those old photos, and they are amazingly sharp and clear.

Looks to me like the shop has both electric and gas lighting in use. Those simple pendant fixtures along the side and back appear to have common Holophane shades and the down-rod appears to end in a loop and link connection down to the socket top. Yes, I have seen old specialty rigid "chain" with a small tubing inside to make a gas pendant look to be electric, and even have seen gas burners designed to mimic electric sockets, but these don't appear to be of that ilk. The center of the room has those nifty 4-arm gas fixtures with Welsbach mantel-type burners in the center. Many of the parts used to fashion such a fixture saw use for both electric and gas lighting, for many years, and I dare say the intent was to try to make the fixture appear to be more up-to-date-----i.e. "electric". The Holophane company also made shades for these Welsbach burners, but with a wider opening to permit better air flow to the glowing incandescent mantel. For what it's worth to the discussion, even here in DC, there were places still using gas lights indoors in the 1910s and even in the early 1920s. Houses in even fashionable areas frequently had fixtures installed with one or two small, discrete gas nozzles installed, "just in case" I suppose.

I have to agree with a previous observation---a number of the phonographs appear to be second-hand. Maybe traded in for the latest bicycle? The cabinet along the left hand wall is stuffed with---what?? One observer on Shorpy commented that it was full of 78s, but those shelves don't appear to be sagging nearly enough to be that loaded down with records---and we all know how much a stack of shellac can weigh!

Not sure why some are saying that some of the machines look second-hand. Everything in the photo looks age-appropriate to me. The elbow of the front-mount Victor Junior is actually ball-shaped and unique to that model. I think that those are discs in sleeves on the shelves to the left. Why aren't the shelves sagging? Perhaps the use of oaken boards rather than fast-grown white pine like we have for most shelving today -- or, perhaps my theory about how the pyramids were built: in the old days, days were longer and things weighed less!

Two buildings that still use gas lighting here in Pennsylvania: the Academy of Music in Philadelphia has gas-lit lanterns on the Broad Street façade, and the Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem has working gas-light fixtures on the interior walls of the sanctuary. Both of these examples use what used to be called "town gas," i.e., low pressure, as opposed to, say, propane gas (high pressure) as used with mantles. The latter give off a very bright light, while the town gas light is a simple flame.

gramophoneshane wrote:

Skihawx wrote:1912 is well past the gas light era. They look like
electric fixtures anyway.

Not necessarily. I dont know about Detroit, but out here the changeover from gas to electricity was fairly slow & irregular. Even in the 1920s, gas was still being connected to city homes as the main source of lighting. I've got a Lassetters catalogue (similar to Sears in USA) from 1911, and gasoliers were being offered alongside electroliers. House interior photos from the teens & twenties often show rooms with gas and electric light fittings, because electricity was fairly unreliable and gas was used as the back-up system in major rooms.

In major cities gas was gone by 1910. The lamps and gas light fixtures in the Sears catalog were actually acetylene gas. The catalogs catered to the rural areas that were not electrified. Home gas generators used carbide to generate light.

We had an 1880 Italianate house in Indiana and I restored the natural gas lighting inside. In the midwest natural gas was plentiful. In other areas coal gas was manufacured for lighting. Coal gas lights sometimes have smoke bells to collect the soot.

Speaking of gas lighting, another great pic from the Shorpy site. These must have been the tanks for the "coal gas" that was used in the DC area. As late as 1990, I was writing my utility check for the household gas service payable to "Washington Gas Light Co."

http://www.shorpy.com/node/5575

Barely visible behind the bicycle hanging from the ceiling at the far right, the familiar Edison print of the elderly couple enjoying their Edison phonograph (forgot the title of that print).