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Petroleum Incandescent Lighting Co. - Oil & Gas Lighting Stock Certificate - Very Rare Topic

Inv# OS1540   Stock
State(s): West Virginia
Years: 1897

Stock. Great title!

For centuries, artificial light has been generated using open flames. Limelight was invented in the 1820s, but the temperature required to produce visible light through black-body radiation alone was too high to be practical for small lights. In the late 19th century several inventors tried to develop an effective alternative based on heating a material to a lower temperature but using the emission of discrete spectral lines to simulate white light.

Many early attempts used platinum-iridium gauze soaked in metal nitrates, but these were not successful because of the high cost of these materials and their poor reliability. The first effective mantle was the Clamond basket in 1881, named after its inventor. This device was made from a cleverly produced matrix of magnesium oxide, which did not need to be supported by a platinum wire cage, and was exhibited in the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1883.

The modern gas mantle was one of the many inventions of Carl Auer von Welsbach, a chemist who studied rare-earth elements in the 1880s and who had been Robert Bunsen's student. Ignaz Kreidl worked with him on his early experiments to create the Welsbach mantle. His first process used a mixture of 60% magnesium oxide, 20% lanthanum oxide and 20% yttrium oxide, which he called "Actinophor" and patented in 1887, US patent issued on March 15, 1887, # 359,524. These original mantles gave off a green-tinted light and were not very successful. Carl Auer von Welsbach's first company established a factory in Atzgersdorf in 1887, but it failed in 1889. In 1889, Welsbach received his first patent mentioning thorium, March 5, 1889, US patent #399,174. In 1891 he perfected a new mixture of 99% thorium dioxide and 1% cerium dioxide that gave off a much whiter light and produced a stronger mantle. After introducing this new mantle commercially in 1892, it quickly spread throughout Europe. The gas mantle remained an important part of street lighting until the widespread introduction of electric lighting in the early 1900s. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mantle

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Condition: Excellent

A stock certificate is issued by businesses, usually companies. A stock is part of the permanent finance of a business. Normally, they are never repaid, and the investor can recover his/her money only by selling to another investor. Most stocks, or also called shares, earn dividends, at the business's discretion, depending on how well it has traded. A stockholder or shareholder is a part-owner of the business that issued the stock certificates.

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