A lamp is a device that makes light.
Lamps usually work with electricity, using a lightbulb.
Since the dawn of the humanity, men tried to create light and chase away the darkness. In that endeavor, he came a long way.
The first lamp was invented around 70,000 BC. A hollow rock, shell or other natural found object was filled with moss or similar material that was soaked with animal fat and ignited.
The oldest stone-oil lamp was found in Lascaux in 1940 in a cave that was inhabited 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.
Humans began imitating the natural shapes with manmade pottery, alabaster, and metal lamps. Wicks were later added to control the rate of burning.
Around the 7th century BC, the Greeks began making terracotta lamps to replace handheld torches. The word lamp is derived from the Greek word lampas, meaning torch.
Lamps appear in the Torah and other Jewish sources as a symbol of “lighting” the way for the righteous, the wise, and for love and other positive values. While fire was often described as being destructive, light
was given a positive spiritual meaning. The oil lamp and its light were important household items, and this may explain their symbolism. Oil lamps were used for many spiritual rituals.
There are several references to oil lamps in the New Testament, In the Orthodox Church and many Eastern Catholic Churches oil lamps are still used both on the Holy Table (altar) and to illuminate icons on the iconostasis and around the temple (church building). Orthodox Christians will also use oil lamps in their homes to illuminate their icon corner.
Early lighting fuels consisted of olive oil, beeswax, fish oil, whale oil, sesame oil, nut oil, and similar substances.
Starting in 1780, the Argand lamp quickly replaced other oil lamps still in their basic ancient form. Its output is 6 to 10 candelas, brighter than that of earlier lamps. Its more complete combustion of the candle wick and oil than in other lamps required much less frequent trimming of the wick
In 1846 Abraham Pineo Gesner invented a substitute for whale oil for lighting, distilled from coal. Later made from petroleum, kerosene became a popular lighting fuel. Modern and most popular versions of the kerosene lamp were later constructed by Polish inventor and pharmacist Ignacy Łukasiewicz, in Lviv in 1853. It was a significant improvement over lamps designed to burn vegetable or sperm oil.
In 1859, drilling for petroleum oil began and the kerosene (a petroleum derivative) lamp grew popular, first introduced in 1853 in Germany. Coal and natural gas lamps were also becoming wide-spread.
Sir Joseph Swann of England and Thomas Edison both invented the first electric incandescent lamps during the 1870s.
Incandescent light bulbs work in this way: electricity flows through the filament that is inside the bulb – the filament has resistance to the electricity; the resistance makes the filament heat to a high temperature; the heated filament then radiates light. All incandescent lamps work by using a physical filament.
Thomas A. Edison’s lamp became the first commercially successful incandescent lamp (circa 1879). Edison received U.S. Patent 223,898 for his incandescent lamp in 1880. Incandescent lamps are still in regular use in our homes, today.
The table lamps have a precise origin dates back 100 years ago, the father of this category of lamp was the Britain engineer George Carwardine. Cawardine was a designer of car’s suspensions but in 1929 he decided to leave his job to experience an idea that he had some years before. He wanted to create a mechanical system “with permanent tension”. In 1931, the first application of his idea was a strange table lamp made by a very heavy base and an articulated mechanic arm that with the support of four springs allowed to move the bulb up and down, left and right or in different position. It was called the Anglepoise, this was the name of the first table lamp. At the beginning it was used in the industrial and military field, it was installed on the trains and on the war planes. The domestic version was put into market in 1935 with the name of “Anglepoise Original 1227”. The lamp had more refined lines and three springs instead of four. It was the perfect lamp because it was used during the black out of the second world.
A lava lamp is a decorative lamp, invented in 1963 by British entrepreneur Edward Craven Walker, the founder of the lighting company Mathmos. The lamp consists of a bolus of a special coloured wax mixture inside a glass vessel, the remainder of which contains clear or translucent liquid. The vessel is placed on a box containing an incandescent light bulb whose heat causes temporary reductions in the density of the wax and surface tension of the liquid. As the warmed wax rises through the surrounding liquid, it cools, loses its buoyancy, and falls back to the bottom of the vessel in a cycle that is visually suggestive of pāhoehoe lava, hence the name. The lamps are designed in a variety of styles and colours.
Pink Lotus Tiffany Lamp – The most expensive lamp in the world the Pink Lotus sold at Christie’s Auction House in New York, on December 12, 1997, for an unbelievable price of $2.8 million. The Tiffany Company was founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1875.