Around The World For A
p. 102 · Read in the full issue
Lamp-Wick
From Our Own Correspondent MANGAIA, Cook Is.
THE style-cramping shortage of parts, glasses, wicks and burners for the oil-lamps still in use in the outer Cook Is., referred to in July PIM, has been
slightly relieved by the arrival of a supply of British chimneys.
The type of Welsbach-Miller-Aladdin, etc., lamp that takes a tubular wick, with or without mantle, is, however, a different proposition. Replacements have been short for years. The writer, who uses a Miller lamp well over half-a-century old, with the almost-legendary crystal “lustres” of Victorian days still around its frame, had, even pre-war, great difficulty in procuring wicks for it. Desperate, I recently applied to a well-known English magazine for the address of a firm able to supply this type. The magazine con tacted a company specialising in oil lights; they wrote to their agents in Fiji.
In due course, a tubular wick was for warded from Suva.
The lighting situation with us of lower Cl is, however, only slightly improved.
We want fishtail burners, both “No. 1” and “No. 2” sizes; and we want them of brass—the inferior substitutes of gilded tin, offered during the war, had a bad habit of “flashing down,” when blown-out, into the front of the lamp, with risk of a fire. In a thatched hut, this is no small danger.
Petrol or kerosene gas-lamps, are not greatly favoured by the native buyer here at Mangaia. Insufficiently-simple in operation, and too many gadgets, they have not supplanted the simple item, that never goes wrong, standard here for 70 years.