Photographs of Eveready Flashlights
(Sunshine Lamps Brilliant as the Sun)
Eveready brings to mind their flashlights and batteries, but Eveready also produced carbons and carbon arc lights—as bright as the Sun.
Originally, the Eveready Company was known as American Electrical Novelty & Mfg. Co. In 1905, it was renamed The American Ever Ready Company. Later it was later to be shortened to Eveready (The American Ever Ready Company), a contraction everyone is familiar with now.
The National Carbon Company, founded by Brush Electric Company executive W. H. Lawrence in 1886, bought half the Eveready shares in 1906, and in 1907 they merged with Union Carbide to form The Union Carbide and Carbon Company. In 1914 National Carbon Company bought all of The American Ever Ready Company.
By 1928, National Carbon company was not only producing carbons likes those illustrated above (in factories like the one below) but was also producing the famous Eveready Sunshine Lamp, a carbon arc light of exceptional quality, illustrated in the photographs below:
Goggles like those above, recently purchased on Ebay, were once commonly used to protect one's eyes from the dangerous ultra violet rays emitted by carbon arc lights like Eveready Lamps.
See The Electric Mirror on the Pharos Lighthouse and Other Ancient Lighting for much more on old carbon arc lighting.
This page was last modified on Thursday, August 19, 2010