Hi all Rain stopped play (work) today so I thought I would do a bit of research, web browsing, on Trove the National Library Of Australia online "Aladdin's Cave of stuff. Great site except the search algorithms behave in strange and mysterious ways. I had always found it strange that the gentleman who invented the "Preston Loop", John Charles Preston, had not received any acknowledgement of his invention that is still used on may lanterns still in production, Petromax and its clones. Attached is what I found
Hi all This is some more stuff from trove. It would appear that Malcolm Preston and Company diversified into other things as the advertisement for a "Tray-Mobile" shows. The interesting thing is the address "Kerona" 204 Clarence St. Sydney. Was the company name named after the building or vice-versa? I will endeavour to find out. The other stuff below is shipping import list that shows they imported mantles from England,that is what the E at the end of the entry means the A in the other meaning America. There are numerous other entries in the import lists but it is a bit tedious to extract them but the Gloria Light Company gets a few mentions. Malcolm Preston and Company also imported from America and Germany, listed as lampware or metal manufacture. Perhaps they imported the vast proportion of their lamp parts as did other companies. Cheers Warwick
Here are 2 maps showing 204 Clarence St Sydney. I have another from 1910 but the file is too large to upload, I will have to crop it down to a smaller size. Cheers Warwick
Well he gets a special mention in the PLC as one of the VIPs of lamp developement. Petromax wouldn't have mentioned his because they used an Aida patent dating from around 1923 in their lanterns and in any case manufacturers might sometimes give a patent number on a product but I don't know of any giving credit to an inventor. ::Neil::
I agree that he is known among the cognoscenti but unknown amongst the general community which is a shame.
