Feminism Is Why Actress Allison Janney Was Never Taught About Fertility
Modern feminists will likely blame 'all the misogyny in the world' for their lack of education, but the culpability actually lies with the feminists themselves.Modern feminists will likely blame 'all the misogyny in the world' for their lack of education, but the culpability actually lies with the feminists themselves.How plastic took over your closet — and what you can do about it
Filmmaker and mother Jessica Solce was frustrated by the difficulty of finding healthy, all-natural products for herself and her family. To make it easier, she created the Solarium, a curated marketplace for third-party-tested foods, clothing, beauty products, and more — free of seed oils, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and other potentially harmful additives.
In this occasional column, she shares recommendations and research from her continuing education in health and wellness.
Every time I return to my parents' home, I find myself standing in my mother's closet.
My parents are moving, and I'm helping. Just as when I was a kid, I still take pleasure in running my hands across the fabrics of my mother's clothes. Everything is silk, cotton, wool. Sturdy, perfectly kept, and just as soft and vibrant as they were 40 years ago.
Acrylic or polyester becomes 'faux fur'; polyurethane or PVC becomes 'vegan leather.' The language makes the substitution sound almost virtuous.
What isn't in her closet is just as striking. It isn't overflowing with heaps of disposable fashion bought for a season and forgotten. Everything seems chosen — the accumulation not of endless consumption but of decades of taste and considered decisions. She bought things she liked, cared for them, and kept them.
Fast and cheap
This kind of restraint is out of style. Modern closets can be filled cheaply and frequently, thanks to synthetic fibers. Polyester, nylon, and acrylic are inexpensive to produce, easy to care for, and endlessly adaptable — and we embraced them. What is stranger is how even luxury fashion followed. Materials once prized precisely for their natural beauty — silk, wool, linen, cashmere, leather, and fur — increasingly share racks and runways with petroleum-derived fabrics. We've gained an astonishing abundance of clothing while losing some of the tactile abundance that made clothing worth keeping in the first place.
The transformation began nearly a century ago. In 1935, DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers produced nylon, the first fully synthetic fiber to become a consumer product. Nylon is a plastic, made from petrochemical-derived polymers, but it could be spun into fibers that looked and behaved like textiles.
Nylon's first great consumer success was women's stockings, and the appeal was obvious. Silk stockings were expensive, delicate, and prone to runs. Nylon promised something stronger, cheaper, and easier to care for. Women loved them: When DuPont introduced nylon stockings nationwide in 1940, nearly 800,000 pairs sold on the first day.
The appeal wasn't hard to understand. Silk was expensive and delicate. Nylon was strong, inexpensive, and practical. Soon, other synthetics offered similar promises: Polyester resisted wrinkles, and later synthetic blends offered stretch, moisture-wicking, and easy washing.
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Wool undefeated
Consumers had perfectly good reasons to want these new fabrics. But somewhere along the way, convenience made us lose sight of the qualities that made natural materials beautiful in the first place.
Acrylic, for example, could imitate wool at a fraction of the price, without the moths or troublesome washing. But the bargain came with costs: Acrylic retains odors more readily, generates static, manages moisture poorly, and can melt when exposed to flame. A good wool sweater can still look beautiful decades later. Anyone who has owned a cheap acrylic sweater knows that isn't always true of its substitute.
What few people standing at a department-store counter in 1940 could have imagined was the scale to which synthetics would come to dominate the clothes we wear. Polyester alone accounts for roughly 59% of global fiber production. We have reached the point at which much of the clothing touching our skin every day is made principally from plastic.
Plastic by any other name
That has consequences far beyond the feel of a shirt. Synthetic textiles shed microscopic plastic fibers as they are manufactured, worn, washed, and dried. Researchers have found these fibers in wastewater, household dust, and indoor and outdoor air. A fleece jacket doesn't cease being plastic because it has been transformed into something soft enough to wear.
Yet we have developed increasingly flattering language for the substitution. Fur and leather, natural materials used by human beings for millennia, are increasingly treated as environmentally or ethically suspect. Replace them with petroleum-derived synthetics, however, and plastic acquires more flattering names. Acrylic or polyester becomes "faux fur"; polyurethane or PVC becomes "vegan leather." The language makes the substitution sound almost virtuous.
Recycling has helped make plastic similarly easier to embrace. Turning discarded bottles into clothing can reduce the demand for new petroleum-derived material, but it doesn't make the plastic disappear. A recycled-polyester shirt can still shed synthetic fibers, and at the end of its useful life, it presents many of the same disposal problems as other synthetic textiles.
You are what you wear
Then there is the more complicated question of what all this means for our bodies.
No one anticipated the emerging health problem of microplastics. Synthetic fibers like polyester, nylon, spandex, and acrylic constantly shed microplastic particles. These particles can contain or carry chemicals, including PFAS — the persistent “forever chemicals” used in some water- and stain-resistant textiles — phthalates, dyes, and flame retardants, some of which are known or suspected endocrine disruptors. The fibers themselves can be inhaled or ingested, while researchers continue to investigate the extent to which chemicals associated with them enter the body through different routes.
Studies have found that chemicals released from textile microfibers may contribute to effects including hormonal disruption, immune stress, and oxidative damage. Other research has linked exposure to certain endocrine-disrupting chemicals, including some used in plastics and textiles, with effects on male reproductive health.
Exactly what ordinary exposure to microplastics means for human health over a lifetime remains an active area of research. The ubiquity of plastics is nevertheless a profound environmental problem affecting the globe.
Cleaning house
So what do we do?
We don't have to empty our closets tomorrow, and we aren't going to eliminate synthetic materials from modern life. They have legitimate uses, and in some circumstances, they are remarkably useful.
But we can begin paying attention again.
We can look at the tag before buying a sweater. We can choose wool instead of acrylic, linen instead of polyester, cotton instead of a synthetic blend when those choices make sense. We can buy fewer things and expect more from them. We can seek out manufacturers that tell us what their products are made from and make things intended to survive more than a season.
Consumer choice helped make the world we have, and I believe it can help change it. Every decision to buy something made from natural materials, to choose something made well enough to keep, or simply to refuse another disposable product creates demand for something better.
Clothes and connection
That belief is part of what led me to create the Solarium. I wanted to make it easier to find the foods, clothing, and everyday products I was already searching for myself — and to connect people with the makers and producers who are still trying to do things well. If convenience helped lead us away from many of these things in the first place, perhaps we can make choosing them convenient again.
And perhaps buying less, choosing better, and keeping things longer isn't a retreat from progress. It's a way of caring for the world we actually inhabit.
My mother's closet offers a small reminder of what that can look like. Those clothes have been kept for decades because they were worth keeping. Someone chose the fabric carefully. Someone made the garment to last. And because it lasted, someone cared enough to preserve it.
That relationship between maker, material, and owner once seemed ordinary. Perhaps it can again.
The secret to being a patient, present father? It's in my basement
Every year on Father's Day, I'm reminded of how grateful I am for my family. I'm also reminded of what helps me to remain grateful: that little oasis of tranquility just down the basement stairs — my home office.
I love my office. I also need it.
I try to get my wife to take advantage of the office. I tell her she can use it whenever she likes, but she never takes me up on it.
It's very simple. If I can't get my work done, I go crazy. I can't get any work done without an office. Therefore, in order to remain sane, I need an office.
Mobile threat
I tried not having one about six years ago when it was just my wife, my son, and me in a little ranch we rented one block over. I had my desk set up in the corner of the living room. I had two computer displays, which, kind of I guess, created a little barrier or faux-wall separating myself from the couch and the television on the other side of the room. It worked, barely, but it was better than nothing.
Then, our firstborn starting walking. And talking.
Fortunately, we moved around the same time. The first thing I did in the new house was to make an office.
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Notes from underground
The new house is small too, with the same layout as the old one: three bedrooms and one bath on one floor. But the new house also has a basement that is about 50% finished. On the east end of this basement, there is a separate room, complete with its own bathroom and a solid door you can actually close.
The floor had been painted red probably 25 years ago. When we moved in, it was chipping and ugly. The walls were covered with equally old wallpaper that ended halfway to the ceiling. People did that in the '80s and '90s a lot. I remember because my mom did it with one of our walls when we were growing up. The bathroom was just as bad. Same red paint, same flowery wallpaper, same '80s horror vibe. But the walls were drywall, and there was a ceiling too — drop in the bathroom, drywall in the main room.
As soon as we finished moving the last box into our new place, I got to work rehabilitating the '80s horror show downstairs.
I ripped the wallpaper down over the course of a few days. I repaired the holes with putty. I painted the walls and ceiling bright white and the floor dark gray. I hung a big mirror in the bathroom, bought a shower curtain, and set two imitation stained glass pieces of plastic film over the small windows. These fake stained glass inlays are pretty cheeseball and not ideal, but it’s better than looking at the weeds through the window up near the ceiling.
I laid a big rug down in the main room and smaller ornate ones around on the still-exposed concrete. I installed a dimmer on the light switch, replaced the old door knobs with new ones, moved in my desk, tables, bookshelves, lamps with warm bulbs, stereo and speakers, microphones, cameras, and everything else that I use for work.
Hole for one
That was six years ago, and since then, I have spent too many hours to count down in my little subterranean sanctuary. Every year, I make it a little nicer. I hang some more photos, organize a little better, buy some more lamps, and try to keep my desk cleaner.
My most recent improvement came in the form of some Oasis lamps, which are advertised as providing warm ambient light. I’ve got four in my office set on “candle mode,” and I can confirm the light is both ambient and warm. It feels nice and light in here despite it being in the corner of a cold basement.
I try to get my wife to take advantage of the office. I tell her she can use it whenever she likes, but she never takes me up on it. I don’t think she likes the basement that much. I understand. The rest of it is kind of a hellhole. The kids play down there a lot, and more often than not, I find myself stumbling over toys and puzzles on my way to my hallowed little haunt of soft lighting and soft music.
A quiet place
We’ve got a small house and three homeschooled kids who use their imaginations instead of iPads. It’s a chaotic environment to say the least. I hear the yells outside the bathroom window, which is near the deck, and I hear the running across the floor of the living room from my desk directly below.
I think what gets to us as parents is the slow grinding down of our patience over the course of the day. It’s also that our stuff is always going missing or something is always being broken. It’s the constant questions and it’s the feeling like we have no space to ourselves anymore.
This is why dads have notoriously taken so long in the restroom and probably why moms take so long when they go to the grocery store by themselves. They are just trying to get some peace and quiet.
That is why I need an office. And while my workspace in the basement isn’t much, it has come a long way since 2020, and it’s more than enough. It’s a little peace and quiet.
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The choice is not between 'real work' and 'just staying home with the kids.' It's between work that pulls you away from family life and work that strengthens and flows from it.Finally: Vaccine guidelines that make sense for parents
Filmmaker and mother Jessica Solce was frustrated by the difficulty of finding healthy, all-natural products for herself and her family. To make it easier, she created the Solarium, which curates trusted, third-party-tested foods, clothing, beauty products, and more — all free of seed oils, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and other harmful additives.
In this occasional column, she shares recommendations and research she has picked up during her ongoing education in health and wellness.
On Wednesday, the CDC moved six childhood vaccines out of the “recommended for all” schedule.
For those of us advocating for the right to oversee our own children's health, it was a day we thought would never come. It is a moment of triumph, but also a reminder of the fear and pressure we have had to overcome.
When my child was just three days old, I was yelled at and expelled from a pediatrician’s office for simply asking about delayed vaccination.
I joined the fight in 2009, not long after becoming pregnant with my first child. My parents brought me up to question and test everything; as I prepared to become a parent myself, this tendency quickly found a new target: childhood vaccinations.
While many mothers-to-be were already signing their future babies up for preschools, summer camps, and Mandarin lessons, I was staying up at night immersed in research that challenged conventional wisdom about children’s health. In 2009, that kind of information was far harder to track down than it is today.
Mother lode
But track it down I did. That’s how I found the work of the Weston A. Price Foundation, as well as the writings of Dr. Lawrence Palevsky. I began reading with the intention of writing a kind of thesis paper — something rigorous enough to convince myself and honest enough to defend to my family.
At the time I encountered his work, Dr. Palevsky was not what most people would call “anti-vaccine.” He recommended delaying vaccination until age two, avoiding live-virus vaccines except for smallpox, spacing doses by six months, and administering only one vaccine at a time.
This seemed reasonable to me.
Brain drain
Why? [Checks 2009 notes.] Based on Dr. Palevsky’s work, I believed that vaccines could activate microglia — the brain’s specialized immune cells — and that closely spaced vaccinations might overstimulate this system during early brain development.
The most rapid period of brain development begins in the third trimester and continues through the first two years of life. Vaccinating children under two, according to this line of thinking, could increase the risk of neurological issues, asthma, allergies, autoimmune conditions, and chronic inflammation. By age two, the brain is roughly 80% developed, and the view then was that certain vaccines could be introduced very slowly after that point.
So I weighed risk and reward. With a healthy baby in my care, why would I take what I believed to be a neurological risk?
That was enough to harden my resolve. I armed myself for what became a 10-year battle in New York City.
Dr. Doomer
When my child was just three days old, I was yelled at and expelled from a pediatrician’s office for simply asking about delayed vaccination. I had printed multiple copies of my small “thesis paper,” like a diligent student, and in a moment of panic and adrenaline shoved them into office drawers as I held my newborn and was escorted out.
But the doctor’s tirade — invoking her intelligence, her own vaccinated children, and her authority as a physician, all while calling me an idiot — only strengthened my resolve. To me, it suggested someone constrained by her own choices, guilt, and lack of curiosity.
Even my father, a physician himself, was initially stunned when I began laying out my reasoning. But through heated debate, shared papers, and real discussion — the healthy kind — he eventually reflected on his own training and acknowledged that he had been taught to comply, not to question.
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Hold the formaldehyde
For anyone ready to do some research of their own, I recommend starting with the CDC's Vaccine Excipient Summary, which lists the inactive ingredients contained in licensed vaccines. Perhaps you'll ask yourself, as I did, whether you want substances like formaldehyde, aluminum phosphate, polysorbate 80, β-propiolactone, neomycin, and polymyxin B injected into your child’s developing body.
Once I began asking that question, it was impossible not to look at how vaccine policy had evolved. A major inflection point, in my view, came in 1986 with the passage of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded vaccine manufacturers from direct liability and moved injury claims into a federal compensation system. After that, vaccine development accelerated.
Today I'm in a celebratory mood, despite how long it has taken to get here. I don’t regret the fight for a second; I only wish I had had more courage and stamina at times. Still, I rejoice in every freedom of choice returned to parents in the United States.
Let’s go, MAHA. Now do the EPA.
Caregiving decisions begin in the bathroom
The holidays have a way of forcing conversations many families would rather postpone.
Every year, as adult children come home and aging parents gather around the table, familiar signs emerge. Someone struggles with stairs. Someone tires more easily. Someone forgets what was once routine. And with those observations come discussions caregivers know well.
The promise.
“I’ll never put Mom or Dad in a nursing home.”
It is often spoken years earlier, in healthier days, and always with sincerity. At the time, it feels like a declaration of love and loyalty. Assisted living seems distant, unnecessary, and meant for other families, not ours.
The problem is not the promise. The problem is that life keeps changing.
Circumstances change. Strength ebbs. What once worked may no longer work safely or wisely.
Over time, what began as devotion can quietly become more than one person can manage alone. Needs grow. Safety becomes a concern. Medical issues multiply. Caregivers often find themselves trying to do, by themselves, what normally requires trained professionals, proper equipment, and constant oversight.
At that point, the issue is no longer love or loyalty. It’s capacity.
That reality came into focus during a recent conversation with a friend. He had offered a small cottage on his property to help a friend relocate aging parents closer to family. The mother now uses a walker. The father has been her caregiver for years, but serious heart problems have begun to limit what he can safely do.
Still the conversation kept circling back to the same refrain: Neither would ever go into assisted living or a nursing home.
Their adult son is caught in the middle, trying desperately to make everyone happy. That is a fool’s task. In my work with fellow caregivers, I call this the caregiver FOG — fear, obligation, and guilt — because it blurs perspective, narrows options, and makes even familiar paths hard to see. No one wins.
It is like driving into actual fog. Visibility drops. Muscles tense. Judgment narrows. We try to peer miles ahead when we can barely see the hood of the car.
Every highway safety officer gives the same advice: Slow down, turn on the low beams, and stop trying to see five miles down the road.
Caregiving requires the same discipline.
My friend asked what I thought.
I suggested we lower the emotional temperature and start with one concrete issue.
Not the promise. Not the arguments. Not the guilt.
Start with the toilet.
Laugh if you like. It sounds abrupt. But it has a way of clarifying reality quickly.
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The bathroom is often ground zero for caregiving challenges. If the toilet is not safe and accessible, the demands on the caregiver escalate immediately. Transfers become harder. Fatigue compounds. Falls become more likely.
Once the toilet is addressed, you move outward.
The shower. The bedroom. Doorways, lighting, entrances.
Sometimes modest changes are enough — grab bars, a raised toilet seat, a walk-in shower. None of these are exotic ideas. But determining needs honestly requires facing the limits of strength, balance, and endurance as they exist today, not as we wish they were.
While politicians and toilets often deal with similar subject matter, toilets remain refreshingly honest. They simply reveal what actually works.
When families do this, reality follows. Cost. Time. Budgets weighed against needs. Timelines measured against declining strength. What once felt like a moral standoff becomes a practical evaluation.
Fear, obligation, and guilt begin to loosen their grip. In their place come planning, stewardship, and direction.
This matters because emotional decisions often rush families into choices that create larger — and sometimes far more expensive — problems later. We see this dynamic everywhere, including politics. While politicians and toilets often deal with similar subject matter, toilets remain refreshingly honest. They do not respond to intentions, promises, or speeches. They simply reveal what actually works.
Families do not choose assisted living or nursing homes in the abstract. Toilets always have a seat at the decision table.
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Surveys consistently show that most older Americans want to remain in their own homes as they age. That desire is sincere and understandable. But staying home without meaningful accommodations transfers an enormous burden onto the caregiver. The home may remain familiar, but the cost — physical, emotional, and relational — often rises exponentially.
Most promises are made sincerely. They are also made without a full understanding of how disease progresses, how bodies change, or how deeply caregiving reshapes everyone involved. Honoring a promise does not mean freezing it in time. It means continually asking how we can care well, given today’s realities.
Assisted living is not a surrender of care. In many cases, it is an extension of it. It allows families to return to being sons, daughters, and spouses, rather than exhausted amateur medical staff running on guilt and fumes.
We are not obligated to preserve every arrangement exactly as it once was. We are called to steward what has been entrusted to us — finances, time, energy, relationships, and the caregiver as well.
Circumstances change. Strength ebbs. What once worked may no longer work safely or wisely.
Important decisions are best made with clear heads, honest assessments, and wise counsel — not under the duress and resentment that so often accompany them. The days after the holidays are not a verdict. They are an invitation to slow down, think clearly, seek experienced guidance, and choose what is best not just for one individual but for the whole family.
The path forward is rarely determined by emotion, decades-old promises, or guilt.
More often, it is clarified by something far more unassuming — and far more truthful.
The appliance in the nearest bathroom.
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It’s my favorite time of year. When it gets cold, I fuel up four or five of the dozens of antique kerosene lamps I own. I use these to heat and light my house in winter; the charm and warmth make the cold and dark more bearable.
In past columns I’ve tried to convince you to abandon new, low-quality appliances and buy old workhorses. This time I want to persuade you to go even lower-tech and give flame light a try. You want to gather around the lamp with good people. You’ll find yourself staring into the flame, noticing the warmth it radiates (literal and metaphorical).
My center drafts have saved me during electricity outages in winter, giving enough light to work by as well as heat.
No electric lamps will make you feel this way. Some are very beautiful, of course, and the most charming use the original Edison-style incandescent filament bulbs. But they’re almost gone.
Thanks to meddling safetyist government, we live under the ghastly glow of LEDs. Before that, it was compact fluorescents. And before that, it was the sickening, flickering off-green morgue illumination of the overhead fluorescent tube, the appropriate furnishing for the inhuman Brutalist aesthetic that has infected 90% of commercial office space in the U.S. since the 1960s.
We weren’t made to live this way or light this way. We did not evolve under unnatural artificial light stripped of whole swaths of the color spectrum, drained of infrared.
We evolved by the campfire. For most of human history, the communal fire was the only source of “artificial” illumination at night. Firelight is a first cousin to sunlight, the original illumination that gave rise to all life on earth.
I’m going to give you basic tips on buying and running lamps, from simple to more complex. There’s a kind of kerosene lamp for everyone.
Sensible safety
Use common sense. You’re working with fire, and larger lamps put out a lot of heat, so be mindful that there’s plenty of clearance between the top of the chimney and the ceiling.
Keep charged fire extinguishers (you should anyway).
Yes, of course it’s possible to tip over a lamp, but in practice, it rarely happens unless you’re careless. They’re weighted to be fairly stable.
People also ask if my cats knock over the lamps. The answer is no, but you must use your own judgment because you know your animals and the layout of your house. My cats love to sleep near them for warmth and will walk on a table to get to them. But they don’t bump them. Again, you must exercise your own judgment.
No, you’re not in danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. Do you have a gas cookstove? Did you ever worry that you would get carbon monoxide poisoning from having your gas cookstove running? If you’re not afraid of your gas stove giving you carbon monoxide poisoning, there’s no physics-based reason to fear it if the flame comes from a kerosene lamp instead.
Carbon monoxide results from incomplete combustion. No combustion is 100% complete, but these lamps are burning close to it. I have been running kerosene lamps for about 15 years. They’ve never even blipped my smoke or carbon monoxide detectors.
No, the lamps won’t “suck up all the oxygen.” Your house is not hermetically sealed. The air is changing over all the time, even with your windows closed. You’re not in a pressurized submarine hull.
But “fumes,” you say. Every time you burn your favorite scented candles, you’re doing the same thing at a small scale, but no one is afraid of “fumes.” I think “fumes” is just miasma theory of disease, like how people used to falsely believe that bad odors from graveyards could transmit sickness to the living.
The only “fumes” you’re going to get with a lamp using clean kerosene are a bit of kero smell on lighting and on extinguishing. If it bothers you, take the lamp outside to light and extinguish. Remember that your ancestors right here in America all lit their homes this way, rich or poor. People weren’t dying of “fumes” or “lack of oxygen.”
The right stuff
Burn only clear, undyed kerosene. Not “lamp oil.” Not “lamp fuel.” These lamps want one thing only: the specific chemical we call kerosene. It’s a petroleum distillate similar to (but much less stinky than) diesel. Kerosene is not explosive like gasoline; don’t fear an explosion.
If you’ve experienced stinky oil lamps, it’s almost certainly because someone was burning “lamp oil,” which is liquid paraffin wax. This stuff clogs up wicks, it burns half as brightly as kerosene, it can smoke, and it smells awful. Stick with clear kerosene labeled “K1” or “1K,” found in your hardware store, Tractor Supply, Walmart, and similar stores.
Level I: Flat-wick lamps
Let’s introduce you to lamps. I categorize as Level I, Level II, and Level III. We’re going to go from simplest and least expensive to more high-powered lamps. If you’re new to lamps, start with Level I, the flat-wick lamps.
Everyone knows these lamps. These are what come to mind when you hear the phrase “oil lamp.” You remember lamps just like this from "Little House on the Prairie" on television.
These are called flat-wick lamps because, you may have guessed, their wicks are flat. This is my “sewing lamp,” so called because it’s tall enough to sit on a table by you for handwork.
Consider a wall-mounted flat-wick lamp, too. These can fit in beautiful wrought-iron brackets. Mount them to a stud in the wall and enjoy the character they add to your room. Below is one of my Victorian wall-mount lamps with a mercury reflector.
Level II: Center-draft lamps
So-called “center-draft” lamps are my personal favorite, and I recommend that you get at least one of them. They draw air from a central tube in the middle of the burner. Unlike flat-wick lamps, center-draft lamps have a round wick. They're larger than most flat-wick lamps, so they put out about three times the light and heat of a basic lamp.
One center-draft lamp is enough to heat a medium-sized room, and you can cook over it in a pinch by rigging up a trivet. My center-draft lamps have saved me during electricity outages in winter, giving enough light to work by as well as heat. They’re essential equipment for anyone who is into prepping for emergencies. Plastic electronic LED lights with fancy solar panels can’t hold a candle to the rugged practicality and versatility of these.
Here’s my favorite, the “New Juno” model, made from 1886 to about 1915.
Any center-draft lamp is a good buy as long as it has all the parts necessary for operation (be sure it has a flame spreader). At the end of this article, I’ll link to businesses that specialize in advice and replacement parts. Do a little bit of reading, and you’ll learn everything you need to know before you buy.
Level III: The magical Aladdin lamp
Technology becomes as fun as it will ever get when one tech is declining as another rises. The old tech has to compete with the new, so the old tech gets refined to its highest potential just before it becomes obsolete.
That’s the Aladdin lamp. “Aladdin” is a brand name, not a generic type. These lamps are the zenith of kerosene technology that was competing with new electric light. These are mantle lamps. What does that mean? Bring to mind the Coleman lanterns you remember from camping. The ones that hiss and put out a very bright light. Those are mantle lamps too.
Aladdin lamps are mantle lamps, but instead of burning compressed gas, they burn kerosene.
In mantle lamps, the light does not come from the flame. The flame is used to heat the incandescent mantle. This is a thin, delicate mesh impregnated with rare-earths and mineral salts. These elements glow white-hot under heat. This is how the Aladdin lamp can produce a light that matches modern electric bulb output.
They are wonderful devices, and I have a few, but they are more finicky. They need a mantle, and you have to be very careful to keep the wick absolutely level, or you’ll get flame spikes that leave black carbon deposits on your mantle. The solution is to turn the flame low and burn off the carbon slowly.
Here’s my 1936 Aladdin Model B in green Corinthian glass:
Hopefully this has tempted you to get your first kerosene lamp. There are some dependable businesses run by people who love these lamps and know everything about them. Most breakable and replaceable parts like the glass chimneys and the wicks are still made and readily available from these purveyors and others.
Nobody knows more about lamps, and nobody has a wider selection of wicks, chimneys, diagrams, and how-to articles, than Miles Stair on the West Coast of the U.S. Go to his site first whenever you have a question.
Woody Kirkman of Kirkman Lanterns manufactures and sells quality reproduction lamps and replacement parts for antiques. You have likely seen his work in period films and at Disney parks and like. He is often hired to supply kerosene and gas lighting fixtures for movies and TV and for theme parks.
Gather those you love around you, and light your lamp.
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