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purposes with three sides dark, and the fourth transparent.— We 
are told that Gideon’s men carried lamps in pitchers, and then 
breaking the pitchers they waved the lights, and so frightened and 
routed the enemy. The Romans also used for military purposes 
metal fire baskets fixed on long poles. 
It must be remembered, in glancing at the means of lighting 
known to the ancients, that all alike gave a flickering unsteady 
light, with a foul smoke and fetid smell, and that till a little 
more .than a century ago, scarcely any improvement had been 
attempted. No candle snuffed itself, no lamp gave anything 
approaching a clear, steady, smokeless light. 
In 1783 however, Leger, of Paris, devised a flat ribbon wick 
and burner, which produced a broad thin flame with but little 
smoke. This he soon further improved by adopting a curved 
form, and this led to Argand’s great invention of the cylindrical 
hollow wick, patented in 1784, with an iron chimney to create a 
draught. In the following year, his partner Quinquet exchanged 
the iron chimney for the glass chimney resting on a perforated 
gallery, a little below the burner, and experience gave the glass 
chimney the well-known shoulder a little above the flame. 
Then for the first time was produced a clear, steady, smokeless, 
full light, and other improvements in lamps were rendered 
possible. The animal oilsthen in use had to be kept at almost 
the exact level of the burner. This in the reading lamp was 
accomplished by a reservoir on the same principle as the 
drinking fountain fur a canary bird, and for the table lamp the 
oil was contained in a narrow rim of V section, which went 
round the lamp and on which the lamp glass or the shade 
rested. For cold countries, where oil would not readily flow, 
Parker invented a lamp in which the oil, fat or lard, was 
contained in a vessel through which passed the chimney, which 
was of metal excepting about 2 inches of glass, at the 
level of the flame. In 1800, Carcel invented his method of 
pumps, moved by clockwork at the base of the Lamp, which 
pumped up a sufficiency of oil. These Lamps were very effective 
for burning vegetable oils, but were costly and liable to. get out 
of order. Although they are still in use for lamps of very high 
quality, they are almost superseded by Franchot’s Moderator 
Lamp, invented 1836. In these lamps the oil is forced up by a 
large piston pressed by a spring on to the whole body of the oil, 
which is prevented from flowing too quickly by a wire in 
the supply tube which checks the flow, exactly in proportion 
to the tension of the spring, hence the term moderator. These 
lamps were exceedingly popular in this country until the great 
importation of mineral paraffin oil. Mineral oils and other 
