The Welsbach Incandescent Gas Burner

From Welsbach System of Incandescent Gas Lighting Catalog

The Welsbach company produced this promotional around 1889 to promote its system of gas lighting. The brochure includes a depiction of the factory in Gloucester, New Jersey, and several illustrations of lighting system components including mantels, burners, and air shutters. The brochure emphasizes the ways that incandescent mantels, which produce light by glowing not just the process of combustion, are superior to previous gas light technologies. Welsbach claimed its system was cleaner-burning, produced a more pleasant quality of light, and minimized the “vitiation of the air,” in other words, it did not consume too much of the room's oxygen as it burned. This may reflect an engagement with the rhetoric of the “fresh air movement.”