I love antique whistles. They’re such fascinating little devices, and they’re proof that just because something is an antique, doesn’t mean that it has to cost a fortune.
I’ve been collecting antique whistles for years, and have a small collection of whistles at home, which range in age from anywhere from 70 or 80 years old, up to over 100 years old. I’ve never been an active collector, but if I see one lying around that I don’t have, and which is in good condition for a good price, I tend to add it to my collection if the opportunity presents itself.
The latest addition to this small area of my much larger, overall collection, is the subject of today’s posting.
Why Collect Whistles?
Antique whistles are infinitely fascinating. They’re symbols of how times have changed, how work has changed, how technology has changed and how manufacturing has changed, over the last few hundred years. They come in an almost endless variety of styles and finishes, and all these variations tell their own little stories – they are pocket-sized pieces of social history…that you can play around with…and unlike most antiques…are so robust that you almost never have to worry about breaking them!
Before the days of mobile phones, portable radios, walkie-talkies, megaphones and all the other handy dandy electronic communications devices that we take for granted nowadays – whistles were the only way that people had to communicate over long distances, or under adverse or busy conditions. This is why they were so incredibly common, and popular.
Whistles were common in a wide range of occupations and professions. Ship’s officers carried whistles to pass orders. Railroad workers carried whistles to signal to other staff and locomotives. Cyclists used to carry whistles on them to warn pedestrians when they were coming through. Policemen carried whistles to call for backup, postmen carried whistles to alert people when they had mail to collect, prison guards carried whistles to maintain order inside prisons, and orderlies in mental hospitals carried whistles to warn of patient riots. During World War Two, ARP wardens carried whistles during air-raids, and during both world wars, army officers carried whistles for issuing commands on the open fields of battle.
In many occupations, there were strict regulations regarding the use and care of whistles. For example in many police forces, whistles had to be clipped to the uniform by a chain so that it could be easily retrieved. In the postal services, whistles that were handed in when a postal-worker retired, had to be sterilised in boiling water before they could be re-issued to new staff. How whistles were used in these various professions were also regulated – how many whistle-blasts were used, what they signified, and under what circumstances they had to be used.
It’s all these varied uses that make whistles so collectible, and manufacturers produced whistles with all kinds of markings, stamps and labels on them as a result. That means that just one standard type of whistle might have dozens, or even hundreds of different markings, depending on which company or entity had ordered the whistle. It might be marked for police use. Or army use. Or postal use. Or use in a hospital, or prison. Or for any other myriad of purposes. Whistles with rare or unique stamps or marks on their barrels are more valuable, and they’re a useful way of trying to determine a whistle’s age.
How old is This Whistle?
This whistle dates to the turn of the last century, which makes it roughly 120 years old. It’s solid brass, and was once plated in nickel. It’s marked:
“THE CITY WHISTLE – PATENT”.
Underneath, is the additional marking:
“ARMY STORES – MELBOURNE”
And finally, it has the country-of-origin markings:
“MADE IN ENGLAND”
Antique whistles are usually extensively marked, and this is good, because it means that they’re very easy to research. Every major manufacturer had their own marks, stamps and trademarks, which were all used at various times throughout history. These variations – which can be something as simple as the formatting, the style of lettering, the size of lettering, or even the orientation of the lettering – can all be used to identify the whistle’s age and manufacturer.
In this case, “THE CITY WHISTLE” with the first two words curved, and ‘WHISTLE’ straight, with “PATENT” underneath – indicates that the whistle was made by the Birmingham firm of Alfred DeCourcy & Company, which was the main competitor for much of the 1800s and early 1900s, to the more famous Joseph Hudson & Co whistle manufactury…or it was, until Hudson & Co bought them out in the 1930s.
Changes in manufacturing processes and little style details also indicate the whistle’s age. Concave cap-loops, and variations in how the mouthpieces were formed, are further indications of the whistle’s age. This whistle was made between 1900 – 1910.
Is it a Rare Whistle?
Probably, yes! It was made by a lesser-known manufacturer, and for a small client, in a far-off country. On top of that, it’s over a hundred years old. All these factors would increase the whistle’s rarity, and presumably, it’s collectible desirability – it’s the rare whistles with uncommon markings that ardent whistle-collectors really want, due to the sheer uniqueness of them.
So…does it work?
Yes! Yes it does. Or it did, once I tweaked it a bit and got it working again.
Despite their apparently simple, tubular construction, these old whistles were very carefully manufactured. Inside the barrel is a flat diaphragm which splits the barrel lengthwise into two chambers. At the mouthpiece-end of the diaphragm is a circular endpiece that stops just below the bottom of the two sound-slots at the bottom of the barrel. There are two tiny semicircular gaps between the edges of the round endpiece inside the barrel, and the interior of the barrel and sound-slots.
It’s through these two gaps that the air passes when you blow on the whistle. Air passes through the mouthpiece and through these two gaps. It’s the passage of air which creates the trill, rippling, warbling, two-toned sound of the whistle.
…which won’t be produced if these two gaps are clogged or sealed up in some way! To fix it was a simple case of clearing out the gunk inside the mouthpiece and around the vent-holes using a pin, and levering out any dents around the slots using a flathead screwdriver and gentle pressure. Once the sound-slots near the holes had been opened and cleared sufficiently, the air could flow smoothly through the whistle, which meant that it could sound exactly like how it should!
I stumbled across these on an online auction site while bidding on some antique silverware. I’d never seen anything like them before, they were in very good condition for their age, and the price seemed reasonable, so I bid on them. I was very excited to win them and add them to my trove of treasures, and they now form part of my collection of antique cufflinks!
The silver cufflinks with the Scotch coat of arms on the front.
These antique ‘torpedo-style’ chained cufflinks, typical of the 1920s and 30s, are sterling silver with blue enamel on the front.
Normally, I don’t collect silver cufflinks, but I made an exception for these, because the face of the cufflinks depicts the crest of Scotch College, in Melbourne – my old highschool. Since I went there for so long, I decided that it’d be a nice little touch to buy them as a memento of my school-days.
The Coat of Arms on the Cufflinks
The coat of arms on the cufflinks is for Scotch College, a private boys’ school in Melbourne. Established in 1851, it’s the oldest school in the state, and, I think something like the…third oldest…school in the entire country.
The coat of arms is quartered by the Scottish Cross of St. Andrew on a background of blue. The quarters depict the Royal Crown representing Australia’s links to the British Empire, the Torch of Enlightenment and Education, the Southern Cross constellation, the Olympiad rowboat with its sails furled to indicate determination, and the Burning Bush (above the crown) to symbolise the school’s religious background.
The blue banner at the top has the Latin motto “DEO – PATRIAE – LITTERIS” (For God, for Country, for Letters). When the school was founded in 1851, the original motto was “DEO et LITTERIS” (“God and Learning”). This was ‘updated’ in 1914 with the start of the First World War, when the motto was changed to the current version, with the addition of “PATRIAE” during such a momentous time in international history.
The complete coat of arms, with the three-word motto and the quartered shield and bush were finally joined together and became the new school coat of arms in 1924.
What is ‘DAMMAN’S’?
Damman’s Tobacconists and Jewelers. Cnr Swanston & Collins Streets, Melbourne. 1954. (Image from SLV)
“Damman’s” was the name of a tobacconist’s shop and jeweler’s on the corner of Collins Street and Swanston street in Melbourne. Established in 1854, at the height of the Melbourne gold-mining boom, the shop lasted for at least 100 years, and was operated by at least two generations of the Damman family. Doing bulk custom-orders for specialised clients (such as these cufflinks for the school) must’ve been a big part of their business, because these aren’t the only Damman’s branded Scotch-related memorabilia which I have in my collection.
How old are these Cufflinks?
My guess is that they were made between the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. There’s a number of clues and indicators that point towards this.
The back of the cufflinks, showing the ‘torpedo’ toggles and the chain links.
First, the school coat of arms was adopted in 1924. So they can’t be any older than that. Second, I know that Damman’s was still producing Scotch-badged memorabilia in the mid-1930s (the cigarette lighter in my collection is from 1932). Thirdly, the cufflinks are chained cufflinks – very common in the Victorian era and the early 20th century…but which started to decline heavily in popularity in the decades after the Second World War.
Such cufflinks would have been unlikely to have been made during the war, and look too old-fashioned for postwar, 1950s construction, leaving a small window of about 15 years in which they could’ve been manufactured.
Does the School Still Sell Stuff like This?
Most definitely! Mugs, shot-glasses, tea-towels, books, clothing, and – yes, even cufflinks – are still sold by the school. They’re purchased from the school’s campus shop, or are offered to students for purchase as part of their graduation-memorabilia package, when they leave school at the age of eighteen.
Sometimes, you really do find the weirdest things, when you’re out antiquing. Over the years, I’ve stumbled across everything from Pieces of Eight to razor-blade sharpeners, pill-rollers and writing slopes. But sometimes…just sometimes…you find something so obscure and unheard of that not only have you never seen it before, you’ve never heard of it before, and you’ve never even come across one on the internet! Likely, you’ve never even considered that such a thing might even exist!
Such was the case last week!
It was on a very windy Sunday morning in July when I picked up this curious rectangular, metal object. It was pointed out to me by the stallholder as something in which I might show a particular interest! And boy, was he right!
I remember staring at this object, a mounting sense of curiosity building up inside me as I laughed at it and picked it up.
“What is it!?” “Ever seen something like this before?” “Hell no! What’s it do?” “It’s pretty fantastic, huh? It’s for heating sealing-wax! You like that kind of old-world writing stuff, don’t you?” “Well…yeah!” “Buy it! You’ll never see another one of these, mate!”
Deciding that he was probably right, I haggled the price down and handed him the money. Apart from a bit of rubbing and wear, the piece was in absolutely wonderful condition – no cracks, no scratching, no dents, no missing or broken parts – everything was in perfect working order! A bit stiff in its operation, perhaps, but nothing that a good cleaning couldn’t fix!
All closed up
The furnace, or stove, is comprised of four main parts.
First is the body or shell. This is divided into two sections – the upper section, accessed by a flat, hinged lid, and the lower section, accessed by another hinged lid, with a circular handle screwed into the front.
The second part is the two-piece burner or spirit-lamp. This is the little rectangular unit that slides out of the bottom compartment. The top half of the burner comprises of the wick, and the adjustment-knob on the side, with the reservoir underneath.
The spirit-burner
It’s basically a small oil-lamp which burns kerosene or lamp-oil. The burner-unit is unscrewed, the reservoir is filled with oil, the wick and burner-unit are screwed back on, and once the oil has wicked its way up the wick, it can be lit with a match. Turning the wick up creates a strong, bright flame that is used as a heat-source for melting the wax.
The bottom door opened, showing the spirit lamp underneath
The sealing wax itself is stored in the third component – the wax pan. The pan is basically a metal dish or trough into which chunks or sticks of sealing wax are placed to be melted. The trough is heated from below by the flame of the spirit lamp, and once the metal is hot enough, the wax inside the trough melts into a liquid state.
Opening the top door reveals the removable wax pan above the burner-unit
Riveted to the sides of the body of the stove is the fourth component of the stove – an insulated carrying handle – suggesting that the stove is meant to be portable – this is borne out by the fact that the burner-unit fits into flanges or grooves inside the lower compartment of the stove-body, presumably to hold it in position under the middle of the wax-pan, and to stop it from sliding around when it’s being carried – important when you’ve got boiling hot wax and open flames around!
Is It A Rare Item?
I suspect that it is. I mean how many antique, working sealing-wax stoves have there got to be in the world? A look online revealed a surprisingly large number of sealing-wax melting devices, variously labeled as ‘stoves’, ‘kilns’ or even ‘furnaces’, but these were all modern ones. They’re low capacity, low-heat devices, usually incorporating a tealight candle.
They’re cheaply made with wooden and metal frames and bases, and are used only for melting small quantities of wax – enough for maybe one or two seals at a time. None of them have any age to them, and none of them are designed for large-scale, long-term use. They’re sold more as a cutesy gimmick, not as an actual piece of office or desktop equipment.
During all my searching, I found only two other antique sealing-wax stoves online, and only one of them was similar in design to mine. This would lead me to believe that they aren’t that common, and that if others do exist out there, then they’ve probably been mis-identified…which wouldn’t surprise me – after all, how many offices would’ve had a device like this sitting around?
What Is The Purpose of the Stove?
The stove is designed to melt and liquefy sealing wax, used for sealing documents and parcels, and provide a device for evidence of tampering. Traditional sealing-wax is very hard and brittle – it’s designed to shatter and crack if any stress is applied to it. Unfortunately, this quality means that it’s also much harder to melt than conventional candle-wax, or even modern, soft-textured sealing-wax.
Given that it would take higher heat and a longer time to melt traditional sealing-wax, it would make sense that any office where documents had to be sealed regularly, such as a post-office, bank, or lawyer’s office, would have a stove like this constantly lit, so that a supply of hot, liquid sealing-wax was on standby at the moment’s notice. To seal a document, one simply had to open the lid, scoop out the required amount with a ladle, and pour it over the document or parcel which required sealing.
How Does It Work?
Very simply! You place sticks or pellets of sealing-wax in the pan at the top of the stove. Drop the pan in, and close the lid. Then you fill the spirit lamp or burner with lamp-oil, or kerosene. You let the fuel rise up the wick, then light it with a match, like any other oil lamp. Turn the wick up to the highest level it can go without smoking, and then slide it into the bottom compartment between the two guide-rails. Then close the lower door (or leave it open, up to you).
Lighting the wick and testing out the spirit lamp
Once the lamp is lit, it’s just a matter of waiting for the flame to heat the pan, to melt the wax down to a liquid state. Obviously, the more wax there is in the pan, the longer it takes to melt. I imagine they did this on a case-by-case basis – they’d melt just enough wax to make a few seals, and after every 2-3 uses, they’d toss in another stick of wax to melt, so that it’d be liquid by the time they needed to use it again, while keeping the stove burning all day long throughout office hours.
The insulated carry-handle at the back
The carrying-handle on the stove suggests that it was meant to be portable – and that it was intended that the stove could be moved from desk to desk around a large office so that different people could use it, rather than taking their documents to a central table to seal them when needed.
How Old Is the Stove and Who Made It?
I honestly don’t know. I’d estimate early 1900s, probably not later than after the First World War, and as far back as the 1880s or thereabouts. There’s no real information on the device itself that gives us any information as to its history.
The only information provided is “SUTHERLAND, THOMSON & Co., 31 Tooley Street, London“. They’re identified as late as the 1930s, as being a supplier of “Dairy equipment and Scientific Glassware” – but that doesn’t mean that they made the stove. They might’ve sold it as the retailer, or simply have bought it for their own use in sealing documents and parcels. I saw one other one online supposedly sold by the same company, so they may have been an established retailer, although I have no real proof one way or the other. There are no patent-numbers, model-numbers, serial-numbers or any other marks on the device at all that tell us anything about it.
As a serious antiques collector since my school days, taking care of one’s collection, keeping tabs on it, remembering what’s in your collection, what you’ve bought, sold, traded or given away, and how to protect, store and display one’s collection is something that is always on your mind.
In this posting, I’m going to be talking about display-cabinets and cases, and what sorts of choices and options there are out there for you to consider, and what issues you yourself need to consider when you select a case or cabinet, dependent on the types of antiques you collect.
Cabinets and Cases – What Are They?
Before we get swept away with the fascination about our intriguing subject-matter, let’s first understand one thing:
Cabinets are not cases, and cases are not cabinets. They are two different things, and each is used for different items. Alright?
Alright.
Display Cabinets
A display CABINET is a freestanding unit or piece of furniture, designed to exhibit the items stored within it. They can be tall and thin, low and rectangular, square, modular and angular. They usually have glass sides and doors and multiple shelves. They may or may not be lockable.
Overview of my display cabinets, with some of the lights turned on
Benefits of display-cabinets is that they’re larger and can keep a larger amount of (or larger-sized) items safe and clean. For a relatively small footprint, they can store and display multiple shelves or layers of collectives and therefore take up a small amount of floor-space for the amount of items that they can store. The disadvantages are their weight and lack of portability.
Display Cases
By comparison, a display CASE is a shallow, flat, box-like container, usually with a glass-topped lid. They’re usually small enough to be somewhat portable and are typically used for displaying small items such as pens, coins, stamps, etc. Basically, anything small that wouldn’t really suit a larger display cabinet, because they would get lost among all the bigger items. They may or may not be lockable, just like their larger counterparts, and may or may not include lighting features.
The benefits of display cases is that they’re smaller and more portable. This makes them great for things like displaying your collections or items for sale, at antiques fairs, collectors’ fairs and conventions, or for displaying your collections in a wider selection of areas (in your study, on the coffee table in your living room, etc).
The disadvantages of display cases is that they take up a LOT of space. Since you can’t stack them when they’re in use, they can take up a lot of space, compared with the relatively small footprint vs. large storage space, of a display cabinet.
Cabinets or Cases? What’s Best for You?
Cabinets are better if what you’re displaying is large, bulky or heavy. Silverware, brassware, antique optical equipment, books, porcelain, etc. Things that you don’t have to strain your eyes to notice through the glass.
Cases are better for displaying smaller things with low profiles, such as coins, stamps, pens, collections of snuffboxes, pocketknives, lighters, and so on.
Having lights makes things easier to see…
When deciding to buy a display-unit for your collections, you need to figure out what’s going to go into it, how heavy your collection is, and where the case or cabinet is going to go. Will the shelves support the weight of that beautiful French porcelain censer? Will the lid close on top of your favourite guilloche enamel table-lighter? Will you be able to arrange things the way you want them to look?
These are all things that you need to consider. If you buy a set of display cabinets – do you have the wall-space for them? Where will you hang your pictures, photographs and clocks? Will it take up space that you need for other things? So much to think about.
Display & Lighting
Once you’ve decided on which option works best for you – cabinets or cases, then the next thing to consider is how to display your collection and whether or not you wish to include any form of illumination.
With a flat case, how you arrange your collection is up to you, but with display cabinets, there are certain limitations that you need to consider.
First – how stable are your cabinets? To provide ballast, heavier, bulkier items should go at the bottom and lighter and smaller things further up. Larger items should be placed at the back of shelves, and smaller items closer to the front, so that all pieces may be seen, with minimal obstruction between one piece and another.
Of course, you don’t have to have lights, but not having them can create shadows which make it harder to see the details of your collection
As much as possible, take full advantage of all the space available to you. Small pieces may be displayed by hanging them from hooks, which you can stick to the sides or backs of your shelves. Narrow-depth, smaller-sized display-boxes with transparent windows, may be used to display smaller items, within the main cabinets, in order to maximise the vertical space between your shelves. This can make it easier to see particularly small items and if these display-boxes can be stacked or otherwise arranged, then it frees up even more space for larger items.
Along with how to display your items comes the issue (or non-issue, as the case may be) of illuminating your display.
Naturally, display cases are generally easier to illuminate. A lamp or two, strategically placed, is usually sufficient to light up your prized collection, but when it comes to larger receptacles, such as cabinets, some form of integrated lighting is either included, or at least, recommended.
Whether it’s battery-powered or comes with a plug and lead, lights should be unobtrusive and shouldn’t get in the way of whatever it is that you’re trying to illuminate. It’s best to stick them in corners or edges, or on the undersides of your shelves, so that they’re out of the way, but still give plenty of illumination.
What Lights Are Best?
It really depends on what your budget and personal situation is. These days, there are a wide range of options. Ideally, you want lights that are small, unobtrusive, and bright. In this arena, we have bar lights, strip lights, and puck lights, all utilising extremely powerful LEDs to produce the necessary illumination. Each of them has their benefits and drawbacks.
Bar lights are comparatively bulky and take up the most space overall. They work off of batteries and/or cables, and this can mess up your delicately placed displays. If you have a particularly LARGE display cabinet, however, and can spare the space, and require the light, then bar lights might be the way to go!
LED strip lights are much smaller in profile, while still being extremely bright. These can vary from very, very, VERY long strips which are typically powered by plug-leads and switches, and comparatively small strips, which are battery-powered. These are often great for small or medium-sized cabinets or smaller display-cases since they don’t take up much room. You just need to think about where you’re going to hide the extra leads, plugs, switches, and battery-boxes.
The last option is using puck lights. Puck lights get their name because they’re flat, round and chunky – like hockey pucks. Puck lights are cheap – A pack of four or six cost comparatively little, they take ordinary AA-size batteries, and require no leads or switches. They can be mounted almost anywhere, and are very bright. Also, you can get them with remote controllers. That way, you can switch on loads of pucks at once, and then them off at once, requiring just a couple of clicks of a button. Useful, if you have twelve lights to turn on and off.
The only potential downside to puck-lights is that they are VERY expensive in BATTERIES. The average puck-light takes three batteries to operate. This may not sound like much (my flashlight only takes TWO batteries!), but when you’re trying to light up a LOT of pucks, the number of batteries required can easily run into the dozens! That said, they do last a long time.
Shelving Types
When it comes to shelves in your display cabinets, you generally have two options: Conventional wooden shelves, and glass shelves.
Wooden shelves are more sturdy and can take more weight. On the flipside, they’re bulky, weigh a lot, and impede the passage of light.
Putting smaller display boxes/cases inside larger display cabinets can make better use of the available vertical space, allowing you to show more things in a smaller amount of space
The alternative is having shelves made of glass. Glass has numerous advantages. It’s light, it means you need fewer lights to illuminate your cabinet, and they take up much less space. The only problems with glass are that glass shelves can be scratched, broken and cannot take excessively heavy loads – so like, I wouldn’t suggest putting your Victorian-era editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica on glass shelves, for example. Glass shelves also show off dust far more than wooden ones.
Doors and Windows
Whether or not your display cabinets or cases have doors or windows is up to you. But there are certain advantages and disadvantages.
The main disadvantage is weight. Such additions as doors, glass, and handles, hinges etc, do add considerably to the weight of your cabinet or case. It’s more things to break, more things to go wrong. If you do transport your cabinets or cases and they have glass doors and windows, make sure you pad and restrain them securely during transit, to prevent cracks and breakage.
One way to keep sub-collections of small items organised within larger collections is to use display-cases or boxes inside your larger cabinets. This is a simple Fererro Rocher chocolate box which I used to put my pocketknife and lighter collection into. It doesn’t take up much space, and it keeps the dust away.
However, glass doors and windows do have advantages. They let in more light, while at the same time, keeping out dust, prying fingers, and other grime. With the right accessories, doors can also be locked, for added security. An alternative for doors when it comes to display cases, is to have a lockable drawer setup, where the entire case can be slid out from under the glass for arranging and displaying items, before the entire thing is slid back in and locked for security.
Concluding Remarks
For the serious collector, having somewhere to store, and more importantly, display your collections is always important. It’s not something to be rushed into, however and as much time as necessary should be taken in deciding what you want and how you want it to look. Remember that your deciding factors should be things like: What are you displaying? What is your budget? How much space do you have, and how can you maximise it?
Do you need to worry about things like earthquakes? Storms? Do your cabinets or cases require anchoring to protect them from toppling or falling? What’s the largest or heaviest thing that you’ll be putting inside?
Think about all these factors and more, before making any serious moves.
One thing that I love about antiques is discovering, and learning about all the weird, whimsical little one-use gadgets that the Georgians and the Victorians invented to overcome fiddly little problems, or created, as elegant solutions to necessary evils.
I’ve seen everything from pocketknives with button-hooks, brass string-caddies that stop balls of twine from rolling away, oval-shaped silver pap-boats for feeding infants, brass pill-rollers, and countless other items too numerous to mention.
Well, last week, I ended up buying yet another historical curiosity – a pair of bone-handled boot-pullers! I don’t know how old these things are, but from the research I did, they used to be very common back around the Victorian era. Modern ones are still made today, but they’re manufactured with wooden handles and the steel rods used to make them tend to be much thinner. Some pullers are even made with plastic handles!
What are Boot-Pulls?
Boot-pulls have T-shaped handles at the top – usually in wood, or in antique ones – bone. Some slim, compact models have thin, folding metal handles. Modern models typically have plastic ones.
Beneath the handles (boot-pulls were always sold as pairs), there’s a long shaft, about six or eight inches. Beneath this is a flat, angular hook with a blunt tip.
They’re designed to help you put your boots on, back in the days when men wore calf-, or even knee-length riding boots. Due to the length of the boot-leg and the confined space inside, it wasn’t always easy to slide your foot all the way down and into the shoe at the bottom. Because the firmness of the leather, and the size of the boot, prevented (or at least made it very difficult) for the wearer to bend their knees or reach their boots to tug them on, boot-pulls were invented.
The whole idea is that the blunt, flat hook at the bottom of the pull hooks into the leather pull-loop or tab at the top of the boot-leg. The length of the metal shaft meant you didn’t have to bend down so far, and you were able to tug your boots on quickly and comfortably without having to fight with them.
Where Did Boot-Pulls Come From?
Back in the old days, boot-pulls were usually sold in pairs and were typically associated with the sports of hunting and horse-riding. It was common to buy a set of boot-pulls along with the rest of your traditional riding outfit such as boots, horse-whip, flasks, hat, breeches and so on. Companies like Swaine & Adeney, which for over 200 years, have specialised in high-end leathergoods such as riding boots and other footwear, would’ve sold sets along with their boots and shoes, or would’ve offered them as optional extras at the moment of purchase.
Boot-Pulls sound useful! I want some!
You can still buy boot-pulls today, although modern ones are typically made with handles constituted from wood, or plastic, rather than bone. Now, as then, some sets were collapsible, with folding handles for easy storage and packing.
If you want an antique set with bone handles, then the easiest place to find them is eBay. Being fairly common, they don’t tend to go for very much and a pair in good condition can easily be purchased for under $100. The set that I purchased cost me less than half of that, and they’ll last forever!
“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth” – Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment.
“Truth isn’t truth”– Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of the City of New York.
It’s been remarked by a number of people that those who collect one area of antiques will often branch out into other areas. Typically, for guys, at least, these areas are:
Fountain pens and related accessories.
Watches and/or clocks, and related accessories.
Knives, and related accessories.
Lighters, and related accessories.
Basically, this theory states that if you’re interested in one of those areas, you’re likely to be interested in at least one of the other three areas. Shamefully for me – I’m interested in all four of those areas. So I’m screwed right off the bat! Haha…
Aaanyway. Enough of that. I am creating this posting for the very real purpose of it being a public service to the collecting community, and the subject of this posting is, as the title says: IMCO lighters! Or specifically, one particular IMCO lighter, which I’ll be talking about later on.
OK. So What is “IMCO”?
Most people in lighter-collecting circles will likely have heard of IMCO, and if you haven’t, here’s a brief introduction:
IMCO was an Austrian manufacturer of cigarette lighters. Established in 1907 by Julius Meister, who was formerly a manufacturer of brass buttons for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Unable to make much money just from making buttons, Meister struck on the idea of manufacturing something that everybody would need, and that everybody would use – not just the army. And that something was the newfangled ‘cigarette lighter’.
Cigarette lighters as we recognise them today were invented in the late 1800s. Early models were unbelievably crude by modern standards, but IMCO got the idea that if they could come up with one good, cheap, simple design, then they could mass produce them, and become the Henry Ford Company of cigarette lighters!
Of course, for the lighters to be cheap enough for everybody to afford them, they had to keep costs down. So that meant that they needed a cheap, readily available source of metal. This wasn’t easy in the 1910s, when Austria-Hungary was fighting with Germany and Turkey, against Russia, France, Belgium, Britain, Canada, and the United States! Any plans to start manufacturing lighters during the First World War were quickly shelved as being wholly impractical. It wasn’t until after the war in 1919, and 1920, that IMCO actually began manufacturing.
The IMCO ‘Trench Lighter’
Due to the restraints of the First World War, IMCO couldn’t actually start making lighters in the 1910s. When the war ended in 1918, the need for flashy brass buttons for the army suddenly ended, and IMCO was groping around to try and find something else to manufacture. In 1920, the first IMCO lighter was released.
The lighter, closed up. At the top is the snuffer-cap. On the right is the flint-tube and striker-wheel. At the bottom of the flint-tube is the spring-loaded arm which keeps the flint hard up against the wheel. Pulling this arm down pulls back the spring so that you can drop in a fresh flint. The brass sleeve around the lighter body is the windshield.
In the days before stainless steel, a lot of metal products were made of brass, because of its ability to resist rusting and most forms of corrosion. The biggest source of brass in Austria at the time was the millions and millions and MILLIONS of leftover shell-casings from the First World War.
Now, whether or not IMCO ever used these casings in their ‘raw’ form to make their first lighters is unknown. Going by photographs I’ve seen, I would say that it was very unlikely. It is possible that they simply used the brass bullet-casings, melted them down and remade the reclaimed metal into the necessary parts they needed, but didn’t use the actual casings themselves to manufacture the lighters.
So, what’s the deal here?
The ‘deal’ is that almost every single one of these lighters – be they originals from the 1920s, or (much more common), reproductions made in China or elsewhere – are always sold as ‘trench’ lighters, a moniker which is not only massively misleading, but also blatantly incorrect, for reasons I will explain below.
What is a ‘Trench Lighter’?
A ‘trench’ lighter is a type of ‘trench art’. ‘Trench art’ is anything decorative or functional, handmade by soldiers while out in the fields or in the trenches during battle, or by soldiers recuperating or on-leave from the battlefront, using materials scavenged or saved or found on the battlefield. Usually such items are things like shell casings, bullet-casings, and metal from food tins or cans of meat and so on.
For something to qualify as ‘trench art’, it has to have been made by a soldier during either the First or the Second World War, while on the front lines (or while on active duty during the wars) using materials available on the battlefield.
That means that for the IMCO lighter to be a REAL ‘trench’ lighter, it would have to have been made out of actual battlefield materials. Which it never was. Even if the brass which was used to manufacture it came from old shell-casings that were melted down and reused, that doesn’t constitute a trench lighter, since it wasn’t made by a soldier on active duty during the war, out of actual field materials. That’s not to say that actual trench lighters don’t exist – they certainly do – but the IMCO lighter from 1920 is not one of them.
Where does this whole thing come from?
If it’s not a trench lighter, and was never used in the First World War, and wasn’t even manufactured until at least a year or two after the war ended, then why is it even called a trench lighter? Where did it come from!?
Honestly, I have no idea. But it perplexed, and later, perturbed me, that so many people were being unknowingly and unwillingly conned or misled into thinking that they were buying some sort of legitimate and original First World War cigarette lighter made on the Western Front or in the trenches or something. The sheer QUANTITY of these so-called ‘handmade’, ‘homemade’ lighters, supposedly produced out of stuff they found lying around in the trenches, should alone, make it a suspect piece, to say nothing of the fact that they all look exactly the same.
Are Soldiers’ Cigarette Lighters a Thing?
Did soldiers in the First World War ever make their own trench-art lighters out of scraps of brass and copper that they found lying around in the trenches, probably while in hospital or on leave, to kill time and have something to do?
Probably, yeah! Some genuine examples certainly do exist. But what was far more common was for established companies to actually manufacture lighters specially for the armed forces (no, the IMCO lighter isn’t one of these, either. Sorry, folks). Many of these were made during the Second World War. The most common models were the Dunhill Service Lighter, and the venerable ZIPPO lighter.
Sliding up the windshield raises and shifts the snuffer-cap to the side, exposing the wick, ready for use.
During the conflict, ZIPPO ceased manufacturing lighters for the civilian market, and sold exclusively to the armed forces. Because brass was required for the war-effort, wartime Zippos were made exclusively of steel – the first, last and only time in their history when the lighter wasn’t made of brass (except of course, for when it was made of silver or gold).
Another example is what is known as the ‘foxhole’ or ‘sailor’s lighter. This consists of a flint-tube with striking wheel, and an adjacent tube through which a thick match-cord or rope has been passed. Striking the flint-wheel causes sparks to land on the frayed end of the match-cord.
Blowing gently on the captured sparks creates the necessary heat to ignite the rope, creating an ember. This ember can be used to light a cigarette or start a fire. Since it doesn’t require lighter fluid and doesn’t actually create a flame, the ‘foxhole’ lighter was popular with sailors, soldiers and campers, and anybody else who might need to start a fire without the aid of combustibles, matches or a conventional cigarette lighter.
Concluding Remarks
In closing – is the original IMCO lighter a ‘trench’ lighter? No. It never was, and it never will be. It doesn’t fulfill a single one of the aforementioned prerequisites to be called a ‘trench’ lighter. It wasn’t made of bullet-casings, artillery-shells or other scrap metal found in the trenches, it wasn’t manufactured by soldiers during combat, and it wasn’t even manufactured by IMCO until two years AFTER the war was over.
If that’s the case, then why do people think it is? I honestly don’t know. As for why it’s still WIDELY manufactured (literally – you can buy one off of eBay right now for next to nothing), I don’t know. IMCO folded in 2012, but this peculiar, fascinating, quirky little lighter, now coming up to 100 years old, continues to be loved, appreciated and admired. I think part of it is the sheer novelty aspect of it, as well as people’s mistaken belief in its fraudulent history.
Is it Possible to Buy an ORIGINAL IMCO lighter from the 20s?
Sure! They ain’t easy to find, but yes, you can buy them. They pop up on eBay from time to time. The original IMCO lighters (as opposed to the reproduction ‘trench’ lighters) are marked on the flint-tube with “MADE IN AUSTRIA”, and the sliding windshield is stamped with “IMCO” and the relevant patent numbers in very snazzy Art-Deco style font. Most of these lighters date to the mid 1920s.
Made of silver-plated brass, what we have here is an icon of classic, 1920s design, made by one of the most famous companies in the world.
I picked this up at my local flea-market. I’ve always wanted a lighter like this. It’s solid, chunky, dependable, stylish, and it looks so much more interesting than the bog-standard Zippo-lighter, which most people are doubtless familiar with, from movies and TV shows. In this posting, I’ll be going through the process of how I restored the lighter, and also a bit about its history in general.
What Is a Lift-Arm Lighter?
This style of lighter is of a kind hardly seen in the 21st century. There’s only a handful of companies that still make them (if that), and prior to their limited resurgence in recent years, haven’t been widely manufactured since the 1950s.
Generally featuring a horizontal flint-tube and striking-wheel, a spring-loaded snuffer-arm, and a refueling hole underneath, usually accessed via a screw-on cap, lift-arm lighters were among the most common types of cigarette lighters available from the end of the First World War, up until the end of the 1950s. In the long and storied history of the lighter, that’s only about 40 years of existence. Not much, when you think of something like the ZIPPO which has been around now, for nearly 90 years!
The name of this style of lighter comes from the very distinctive spring-loaded snuffer-arm which is mounted on the top of the body, parallel to the horizontal flint-tube and striking-wheel. To operate the lighter, you flip the arm upwards and then strike the wheel to create the necessary sparks to light the fuel. When you’re done, you flip the snuffer-arm the other way, and it snaps down to extinguish the flame and protect the wick. Since you had to flip or ‘lift’ the snuffer-arm each time you wanted to use the lighter, they became known as ‘lift-arm’ lighters.
How Old Are Lighters Such as These?
A traditional, liquid-fuel lighter of this kind typically dates from the late 1910s/early 1920s, up to the late 1930s/early 40s. They appear to have died off during the war. This style made a BRIEF resurgence in the 1950s, but then appears to have died off again by the end of the 1960s.
That being the case, the majority of lift-arm lighters of this style date from the 20s and 30s, when they were in their heyday. Prominent manufacturers include POLO, PARKER, and DUNHILL, along with a variety of European and American manufacturers. If you’re looking to buy an original lift-arm, then in most cases, you’ll be hunting down a lighter that is the better part of 80 – 100 years old.
Lighters like these date back to the days when smoking was not only common, but highly fashionable. The dangers of smoking were unknown (or at least unacknowledged), and tobacconalia was extremely popular. For most men and a lot of women, owning a flashy lighter was as common an accessory in 1930, as owning a smartphone is today. Lighters were made of solid gold and silver, and in some truly beautiful and fascinating designs and styles.
It’s a thrill to own a lighter from this fascinating and bygone era, full of such elegance, even for something as questionable as smoking. While I don’t smoke, I have always felt that smokers from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s had some of the most interesting and beautiful smoking accessories ever made.
What is YOUR Particular Lighter?
The model that’s being featured in this posting is the DUNHILL Model A ‘Sports’ lighter, manufactured in the second half of the 1920s (ca. 1924-1928, according to my research). As far as lift-arm models go, it’s one of the most famous designs ever produced.
The lighter has certain features which were iconic to the Dunhill brand, such as the distinctive, downward-curving lift-arm, with “Dunhill” on it, and the three-slot windshield (what ZIPPO would later call a ‘chimney’, in the early 1930s).
Here, you can see the flint-tube (front), the flint-wheel (on the right), and the lift-arm snuffer-cap (behind).
The lighter is made of brass, and is plated in silver. Here and there, the silver plating has started to wear off, most likely from use, cleaning, and just the friction from being shoved into, and being pulled out of, pockets for 95 years!
One of the more interesting features of the lighter is the windshield or chimney which surrounds the wick. Although it has a number of horizontal vents cut into it, the purpose of the windshield is, nonetheless – to guard the flame and wick against the wind. The vents in the sides of the windshield allow for airflow and sufficient oxygen for the flame, while the body of the shield reduces the likelihood of the surrounding wind to snuff out the flame accidentally.
Whatever you call them – wind guards, windshields or chimneys, this feature was very rare on early lighters. Most lighters from the 1890s through to the 1930s had no wind-protection of any kind (or at least, had very, very little), making them nigh impossible to use outside on anything but the calmest of days. One of the selling points of the ZIPPO when it came out in 1932, was that it was the ZIPPO WINDPROOF LIGHTER!
While no lighter can be said to be fully windproof, the chimney or windshield did at least give the flame a fighting chance, allowing the lighter to be used more easily outdoors.
That said – even into the 1930s, such features were rare (and still are rare) on the majority of cigarette lighters – especially those of the lift-arm variety, so the presence of the shield makes this one stand out quite significantly.
Restoring the Lighter
This lighter, while functional, was in a very sorry state of affairs when I bought it. The whole body and mechanism were black and grey with heavy tarnish and the mechanism itself was clogged with dust, grime, ash and soot.
Removing the Windshield
The first order of business was to clean the lighter and remove all the grime and tarnish. Part of this process was removing the windshield or chimney from around the wick and flint-wheel. Easy in theory, but difficult in practice!
Removing the windshield, its two screws, and the filler-cap (inside the glass bowl).
The windshield, chimney or wick-guard (whatever you want to call it) was held onto the top of the lighter’s body by two absolutely microscopic screws. The first step was to clean out all the gunk inside the windshield, and then locate the screws. Using a very small, very thin flathead screwdriver, I unscrewed the two screws and very carefully lifted the shield off of the lighter. I tipped the two screws into a glass cup nearby to stop them from rolling away, and then started cleaning the shield, polishing it, removing dust and grime, picking out old bits of wick, cleaning the wick-housing and everything else that I could reach while the windshield had been removed.
Once the shield was clean and the area where it was mounted onto the lighter was clean, I had to reassemble the whole thing. To do this, I mounted the shield back on top of the lighter and then I had to get the two screws down through the shield and onto their holes, and then screw them back in.
How?
The screws are TINY (about half a grain of rice), and there’s no way to grip them while screwing them in. In the end, I used Blu-Tak (what some people might call adhesive Plasticine) to stick the screws onto my screwdriver. Then I lowered them one at a time, through the gap in the windshield and into their respective holes. Then I very carefully screwed them back in.
Sticking the screws to the head of my screwdriver with plasticine so that I can screw them back into the lighter.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this was easy – it took about 3-4 tries for each screw, before I got the threads to line up properly, but once they do, the actual act of screwing them down was thankfully – very easy.
Replacing the Wick, Flints and Wadding
Next came the relatively easy task of replacing the wadding, the wick and the flint inside the lighter. This was done by unscrewing the fuel-cap underneath the lighter, and removing all the cotton-ball wadding using a pair of tweezers. After teasing out little tufts of cotton wool, it was a matter of grasping them in the fingers and then spinning them around and pulling at the same time. This caused the wadding fibres to mesh together. This means you can pull them out more easily, and you can pull out more wadding each time, instead of little tufts.
Removing the wick and the original wadding.
Once the wadding was out, the wick came next. At some point in this lighter’s history, some ingenious fellow had come up with the idea of wrapping very thin steel wire around the base of the wick, and leaving several inches of this wire to trail off the end. This is a great idea! It means that you can feed the wire through the body of the lighter…and out the other side.
That means that you can grab the wire, and yank it through the lighter, and that pulls the wick inside along with it. No more screwing around with trying to stuff the wick inside, just pull it in. Any old copper or steel wire (of an appropriate thinness) will do. Just make sure you wrap it around the wick a sufficient number of times so that it doesn’t unexpectedly unravel when you use it to tug the wick through the lighter.
If you find replacing the wick on your lighters to be particularly troublesome, perhaps try this method? About six inches of wire should be more than enough. Once the wick is through, simply roll or fold up the excess wire and stuff it into the lighter along with the wadding.
Once the new wick was inserted, it was just a matter of packing in fresh wadding. Now this isn’t strictly necessary, but I like to replace the wadding with fresh wadding when I restore my lighters. The wadding is ordinary cotton wool balls so they cost nothing, anyway. The average lighter (eg – Zippos, and lighters of that size) typically take 6-8 balls, firmly packed inside. Once it was full, I put the cap on and then looked at the flint.
The next step was to replace the flint. Now this lighter didn’t have a flint when I bought it, but I have plenty of spares, so it was easy enough to unscrew the screw and spring on the flint-tube and drop in a fresh flint and then screw it shut again. Now what some people may not be aware of, is the fact that the majority of antique lighters actually take TWO flints!
One flint goes into the flint-tube at the top of the lighter, the other flint – the spare flint – goes inside the lighter. In the majority of antique lighters (including this one), the spare flint is housed in a TINY compartment INSIDE the fuel-compartment screw-on cap. Simply remove the cap from the fuel-tank and inside should be a little cylindrical cap – unscrew that – the spare flint goes in there. Usually, they’re big enough to hold one flint, but sometimes you can cram two in there.
Removing the Engraving
Once all the working parts of the lighter had been seen to, the next thing to address was the engraving on the snuffer-cap.
Now personally, I hate engravings. Unless it’s a gift, a dedication, reward, a date, or a monogram, I find them really tacky and unsightly. Given a choice, I’d almost always prefer an antique without an engraving. That said, some engravings can be fun because they add something to the object – a date, an event, an important name, etc. In some antiques, engravings can be a useful dating or research prompt.
Not in this case. The engraving of the owner’s initials just didn’t add anything to the lighter. So I decided to remove it.
Removing the engraving was just a matter of polishing. Lots and lots of polishing. I started with 200-grit sandpaper for the initial scrubbing, then moved up to 400-grit paper, and then finally, 0000-grade steel wool, mixed with sewing-machine oil and Brasso. What you’re doing with this process of polishing and sanding, is removing the surrounding metal, a microscopic layer at a time, until the surrounding metal reaches the lowest point of the engraving. Once the metal is level again, the engraving will disappear, leaving smooth, glossy metal (in this case, brass) behind!
Of course, this can only be done properly once, so you need to be very careful. Fortunately, the engraving on this lighter was very shallow, so removing it was no challenge.
Once that was gone, it was simply a matter of polishing the entire lighter, to remove as much of the grime and blemishes, marks, tarnishing and crud as possible. The lighter would never look 100% brand-new, what with plating-loss and such, but it at least looked clean and attractive enough to be picked up and used!
Fueling up the Lighter
The final step in the restoration was, of course, making sure that the lighter works! I juiced up the fuel-tank with four or five generous squirts of lighter-fluid and screwed the cap on.
Lighters like this 1920s Dunhill are designed to be operated by one hand – indeed, by one FINGER of one hand – typically the thumb. In normal operation, the lighter is held upright with the flint-tube facing towards you (so that you’re looking at the lighter from ‘behind’, with the lift-arm snuffer-cap facing away from you).
The lift-arm is flipped up using the thumb, and then the flint-wheel is struck rapidly from right to left. Assuming that everything is clean and functional, one half-turn of the flint-wheel is all it takes to create enough sparks to light the fuel-vapours and ignite the lighter.
Help! My Lighter Won’t Light!?
When it comes to repairing or restoring antique lighters, this is one of the most annoying things ever. You spend all that time lavishing care on your newfound lighter, and the damn thing just refuses to repay your kind attentions by deigning it necessary to carry out its primary function – lighting up!
Why not??
Antique lighters fail to light for a number of reasons. Here are some of the most common ones:
There’s No Fuel!
Probably the most obvious reason – there’s no go-juice in the tank! Antique lighters take liquid fuel – typically some manner of petroleum spirits. For there to be enough fuel to burn, the tank needs to be full. The cotton wadding soaks up the fuel and the wick transports this fuel up to the top of the lighter. But if there isn’t enough fuel, it’s not going to reach the wick. The lighter is full when you’ve thoroughly saturated all the wadding (typically 4-5 generous squirts of the can will be enough).
The wick is too short…
Antique lighters have wicks, just like old-fashioned oil-lamps or candles. And the same principles apply – if the wick is too short, then there’s nothing to burn! Now, on a properly functioning lighter, it’s not the wick itself that burns. What burns is the fuel-vapour around the wick that is drawn up through capillary action. But if the wick is too short, there isn’t enough surface-area above the top of the lighter for there to be enough vapour to light.
This is easily remedied by tugging out the wick until it’s long enough for the sparks to catch the fuel-vapour. Typically, the wick should be as high as the top of the windshield, or as high as the top of the snuffer-cap.
The wheel isn’t sparking
Another really common reason as to why lighters won’t light is because there’s no spark to get it going.
When you strike a light, you spin the corrugated flint-wheel or striking-wheel against the small pellet of flintstone inside the lighter. The corrugations scrape the flint and this produces sparks – it’s a principle known for hundreds of years that steel plus flint = sparks.
But this won’t happen if there isn’t enough friction between the flint and the wheel for the lighter to spark properly. Why is this?
There’s three reasons.
1). The flint isn’t touching the flint-wheel.
A REALLY common problem with old lighters is that when you buy them ‘in the wild’ in flea-markets, etc, they often still have old, corroded flints inside them! These old flints are beyond saving, and they’re often impossible to spark. They must be removed from the flint-tube, and a new flint should replace it. To remove the flint, just take the flint-tube cap and spring out, and tap the old flint out.
Sometimes if it’s stuck, you may need to tap the lighter on a table or something, to coax it out. If it’s REALLY stuck up in there, you can use something like a nail, a pin or a screwdriver to smash up the flint and pick at it. This will break up the flint into chunks and they should fall out on their own. Use pipe-cleaners or toothpicks to make sure that all the flint is gone, and then replace the old flint with a new flint.
2). The compression is incorrect.
Every lighter that operates with a flint has a flint-spring inside it. This spring is used to apply pressure to the flint, so that it’s kept hard-up against the side of the flint-wheel, so that when you spin the wheel, there’s enough friction to generate sparks. If you spin the wheel and there’s no sparks, (or very few sparks) then there’s probably either not enough (or too much) pressure from the flint-spring pressing on the flint.
Fix this by fiddling with the screw-cap at the end of your flint-tube. The tighter you screw it shut, the more pressure and friction there is, the looser it is, the less pressure and friction there is. Typically, the tighter you can get it, the better the lighter will work. But, you can get it SO TIGHT that there’s no way for the wheel to spin. If so, loosen the screw-cap slightly until there’s just enough laxity for the wheel the spin, but enough compression that the spring holds the flint against the wheel.
Now when you strike the wheel, the lighter should light.
3). The wheel is clogged!
Another reason why the lighter may not strike right is because the corrugations on the flint-wheel are clogged with gunk (either dust, lint, or more commonly – flakes and chips of old, corroded flints). All that gunk means that the edges of the corrugations can’t catch the flint and strike it. This grime can be removed using a stiff brush and plenty of scrubbing.
That said, another reason your lighter may not strike is because the flint-wheel is simply worn out. This is VERY rare, because flint-wheels last almost forever, but it can happen. If it does…well…sorry to say it, but you have a dead lighter. But, barring that, just about any antique lighter in decent condition can be made to be serviceable again.
Closing Remarks
That pretty much brings this little saga to a close. While some might baulk at the idea of lavishing this much attention on a cigarette lighter, it is nonetheless, a very old and I think, beautiful cigarette lighter, and one that was well worth the effort used to improve its condition, to something resembling its original appearance.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this posting! Perhaps it’s given you some instruction on how to fix your own antique or vintage lighters that you’ve collected, inherited or found in the wild. I’ve always wanted a functioning, Dunhill lift-arm lighter from the 20s. They’re iconic! And I was so glad to have the opportunity to breathe new life into this worn-looking antique.
After selling one of my telescopes last year at an antiques fair (and making a very healthy profit on it, if I do say so myself!), I was able to splurge a bit on another ‘scope – of a particular style which I have, until now, not had the privilege of adding to my collection.
I’ve seen a number of these telescopes over the years, but they were all in absolutely terrible condition. Most of them were covered with dents, scratches, loose or broken lenses…and outrageous price-tags! I don’t know about you, but $650 for a telescope with no glass inside it sounds like a very steep price to pay for what is basically a very nice, polished metal tube covered in leather.
I got this particular ‘scope from my local flea-market and after checking it all over for flaws and damage, decided that it was worth the expense to buy it. It had one or two minor faults, all relating to the leather sheathing, but nothing that some restoration (eventually…if it ever needs it) couldn’t rectify. So, for much less than the nearly $700 that the other telescopes were going for, I decided to buy it.
What is an ‘Officer of the Watch’ Telescope?
With its long, thin profile and single draw-tube, sliding glare-shield and smooth, leather cladding, this telescope is quite different from a lot of the others that you’ll find out ‘in the wild’ as it were. Most antique telescopes that you’ll find out and about are multi-tube telescopes without any type of sliding glare-shield, and they’re usually much smaller, with a closed length of anywhere from four to six to eight inches; some slightly larger ones might be about twelve inches, but not many will be longer than that.
Telescope with the draw-tube (back) and the glare-shield (front) extended.
By comparison, an officer-of-the-watch telescope typically measures 18 inches when closed up, stretching out to about two feet when fully extended. Most other telescopes can double or triple their lengths easily when they’re extended, while this particular model does not. Exactly why it was designed this way will be explained later on.
The Maker’s details.
These telescopes are called Officer-of-the-watch/officer-on-watch (‘OOW’) telescopes because they were usually purchased by officers or captains serving in the navy or the merchant marine for use on the ship’s bridge. Such telescopes were either the private property of the officers who carried them, or else were the property of the ship, and were kept on the bridge at all times for use by the crew. Their purpose was to provide a vision-aid close to hand for officers on the bridge in the event of an emergency.
Why are they shaped like they are?
A closeup of the glare-shield.
As I said earlier, Officer-of-the-Watch telescopes are long and narrow, with single draw-tubes and sliding glare-shields over their objective lenses. Their unique shape is due to the constraints of their working environments. Since these telescopes were usually kept (and used in) the bridge of a ship at sea, they had to be compact. A shorter, two-foot telescope was lighter, easier to carry and easier to use in the confined space of a ship’s wheelhouse, compared to a more conventional naval telescope (some of which could be three or even four feet long!). Try swinging that around inside a wheelhouse without cracking the helmsman in the head! He won’t thank you for it!
How Old are these Telescopes?
Officer-of-the-watch telescopes date to the early 20th century and appear to have been made exclusively in Britain. They were manufactured starting ca. 1900 up to the middle of the century. and were originally manufactured for the Royal Navy, but their use drifted into regular merchant-marine use as well due to their practicality of design.
So, what is an Officer of the Watch?
In the ship’s crew, an officer of the watch (or ‘officer on watch’) is the officer in charge of watchkeeping. Every officer on the ship, generally from the captain down to the lowest-ranking officer, covers watchkeeping in shifts. Traditionally, a watch was four hours long. During that four-hour shift, an officer stood watch on the bridge. Here, he could oversee the ship’s navigation, the weather, the speed and direction of travel, and could respond swiftly to emergencies. The officer of the watch had to be good at navigation, reading the weather, and at assessing dangerous situations such as storms, reefs, rocks and other hazards. In the absence of the captain (who might be sleeping, working, having dinner or be otherwise engaged), the officer of the watch was in charge of the ship’s immediate handling and navigation.
The “HUSUN” trademark on the glare-shield, comprised of the ocean and the rising sun
Typically, the officer of the watch was joined by at least two other sailors – a forward lookout or two, and a junior seaman known as a quartermaster, whose job was usually that of controlling the ship’s direction by manning the helm or the ship’s wheel. Officer-of-the-Watch telescopes were usually mounted on the wheelhouse walls, secured in place by brackets or rings to stop them rolling or sliding around.
In the event of something posing a hazard or threat to the ship (such as an oncoming storm, a coastline, rocks, a lighthouse or other ships), the officer of the watch could use the telescope provided (or one which he himself had purchased) to assess the situation ahead.
The bridge of the RMS Queen Mary. The semicircular devices on pedestals are the ship’s engine-order telegraphs
Since it could be dangerous to leave the wheelhouse during rough or stormy weather, a slimmer, more compact telescope which could be used easily indoors was preferable to the much longer, thicker, and heavier telescopes usually used at sea. Once the hazard had been identified, the ship could take appropriate action, either changing course, or else ordering the ship to stop or slow down, usually done by operating the engine-order telegraphs on the bridge, to send or ‘ring’ orders down to the engine-room below (each telegraph was equipped with a bell that dinged with each movement of the telegraph-arm so that the engineer could hear the change in orders from the bridge, over the drone of the engines).
What Features do these Telescopes Have?
To begin with, one of the most noticeable features of these telescopes is how thin they are. Typically not more than about three inches wide (if that!). A useful feature, since it would make the telescope easy to grip and hold – even if it’s winter on the Atlantic, and you’re wearing gloves to stop frostbite, but you need to spot an iceberg right ahead!
Another useful feature is the leather, non-slip cladding on the barrel. This was partially done for style purposes, but it also makes the telescope easier to grip with wet, cold hands in an emergency.
The third most noticeable feature that you’ll find on every officer of the watch telescope is the sliding shield at the front. Variously called ‘dew shields’ and ‘glare shields’, their purpose was to keep rain, seawater, spray and sunlight off the main lens (known as the ‘objective lens’). By sliding the shield out ahead of the lens, it prevented the sun’s rays from reflecting off the glass and potentially blinding the user, and it also kept the glass clear of raindrops or sea-spray in heavy weather, and was a popular feature on maritime telescopes.
Are These Types of Telescopes Common?
They are fairly common, yes. I’ve seen about four or five before I eventually bought this one. Most of them were in terrible, unusable condition due to their age and the lives they led, but you can find working examples for not too much money, if you’re patient. They’re typically made of brass (which may or may not be nickel-plated. Mine is plated) and are typically 18 inches long, extending out to about 24 inches in open length. Living in Australia, a country which until the late 20th century was accessible only by ship, finding maritime antiques isn’t that difficult. Barometers, ship’s clocks, telescopes, binoculars and sextants are pretty common here.
If you’re thinking of buying an antique telescope, then you need to check for things like dents, cracks, scratches and warpage. Damaged lenses can be hard to replace, and so should be avoided. Dents on the barrel (but even moreso on the draw-tubes) should be avoided as much as possible. Dents will misshape the profile of the tube and make it harder to draw in and out of the telescope. Dents on the draw-tubes will cause the telescope to jam.
If you have the right tools and enough patience, you can press and roll out (or at least reduce) stubborn dents, but you should be careful not to warp the shape of the tube. I was able to use a heavy, wooden rolling pin to roll out the dent inside the glare-shield on one of my favourite telescopes with great success. It wasn’t entirely eliminated, but it was reduced significantly – enough that it was no longer causing the shield to jam every time I opened or closed it.
The eyepiece shutter (closed) on the end of the telescope.
You should check that the sliding eyepiece shutter over the eyepiece lens is in good condition. If loose, they can be tightened by screwing them back into place. If they’re too tight, loosen the screw slightly. If the screw works itself loose repeatedly after tightening, every time you open and close the shutter, then a DROP of oil on the shutter will provide enough lubrication to allow the shutter to slide open and shut, without the friction that would also loosen the screw.
Simply tighten the screw as much as possible, apply a dab of oil and work it in. I’ve had to do that with a couple of telescopes in the past and provided the oil doesn’t dry out completely (unlikely), then it’s a very effective little fix.
Last but not least, you should check the telescope for its lens cap. Not all telescopes were designed to have lens-caps, but most did. This one does not have a cap over the objective lens, and never did. Instead it has a leather hood that drops over it, but most telescopes are meant to have them, to protect the objective lens from dust, water and damage. That said, it’s rather common to buy antique telescopes without their lens-caps included.
Anyway, that wraps up my posting about my rather different and interesting addition to my collection. For more information about antique telescopes, I can strongly recommend the blog of Nicholas Denbow, at The Telescope Collector. His posts are both entertaining, informative and fun to read!
If you’re like me, and have had to grow up with appalling eyesight, then you’ll know that you can never have too many magnifying glasses. Ever since the day I started highschool, I’ve always wanted a pocket magnifying glass. Something which I could carry around with me and use whenever I needed to read small text, or magnify something which I couldn’t see clearly.
These days, there’s all kinds of magnifiers available. They come with lights, folding lenses and protective cases, they’re downloadable apps on your phone which you can customise to your needs, they have sensors and zoom-functions and all the rest of it.
And almost all of them are made of some cheap plastic stuff, usually in garish colours and god-awful patterns, and with weird, whacky designs that make them look more like toys than anything else. And this is the main reason why I have never bought one.
Instead, for many years, I held out, hoping to find something a little nicer, a little more refined and elegant, something useful that didn’t look like just another mass-produced vision-aid. Deciding to take a page from the book of history, I started hunting for a quizzing-glass.
What’s a Quizzing Glass?
“A what?”, I hear you say.
A quizzing-glass, I repeat, a quizzing-glass.
Alright…and what is a ‘quizzing-glass’?
I am so glad you asked, because this post is going to be all about them!
My sterling silver quizzing-glass, complete with silver albert-chain.
First, a bit of background – struggling with a heady mix of myopia and astigmatism (the eyes’ inability to both focus, and stabilise an image) – my eyesight has always been awful. Don’t get me wrong, I can see well enough to do just about anything – with enough time, patience and swearing, I can thread a needle if I really have to – but because of my conflicting vision-conditions, I’ve always suffered from terrible nearsightedness – hence the need for a decent magnifying glass.
To this end, I’d spent a long time – at least 10 years – searching for a decent quizzing-glass to use as a magnifier. Unfortunately, quizzing-glasses are both rare, and expensive. Despite visiting countless fairs, shops, and dealers, I’d never been able to find one, or afford one, or buy one which I liked enough to spend money on – when a glass costs upwards of $600 retail, you want it to be the best possible…and even then, I didn’t have $600 to blow, being a poor university student at the time.
Anyway, enough backstory – what is a quizzing-glass??
Quizzing-glasses, or ‘quizzers’ as they’re also called, are small, pocket-sized handheld magnifying glasses with single lenses. The lenses are about the size of a large coin, and the frames and rims are typically made from gold, silver, or Pinchbeck-Brass (more about that later). Quizzers typically came with a handle or ring under the frame to hold in the hand or fingers, and the same handle or frame also served as an anchoring point for a chain, ribbon or cord, that affixed to the user’s clothing or went around the neck, to prevent damage or loss during the course of a day’s usage.
Quizzing-glasses were very common in the 1700s and 1800s. At a time when eyesight conditions were typically corrected with crude lenses and eyepieces such as Nurnberg spectacles and handheld lorgnettes, high society was looking for something more elegant and refined.
‘Nurnberg’ spectacle-frames, named after the town in Germany where they were invented – the most common type of spectacles in the 1700s. They would eventually evolve into the French ‘Pince-Nez’.
Quizzing-glasses were a lot more than just eyepieces to help you read stuff, in the 1700s, they were also flashy fashion-accessories! It was very common for a man – or even a woman – of means, to sport a quizzer as a fashion-accessory, even if they didn’t even need one! Peering at something through a quizzer became an upperclass affectation – one might, or might not, be genuinely interested in whatever they were looking at – but if they did look at it, then it was usually through the lens of a quizzer! In the later 19th century and even into the 20th century, this action was usually replaced by the more well-known monocle (yes, there is a difference, I’ll talk about that later, too!).
For gentlemen in the late 1700s and early 1800s, stereotypical accessories were the walking-stick and tricorne hat. For ladies, a parasol and fan were the most common accessories – but both sexes carried, and used quizzing-glasses.
Why Use a Quizzing-Glass?
I suspect the main reason why they were so popular is partially because they were cheaper. Spectacles – even relatively simple ones, needed so much work done to them – two identical lenses, two rims, screws, springs, a bridge, nosepads…and if you wanted them, then also temple-arms – and if you did want them, then that meant adding hinges, more screws, finials, and maybe even a protective case to go with it…it’s getting expensive now, isn’t it?
My Pinchbeck brass quizzer, from the early 1800s.
On the other hand, if you weren’t the type who desperately needed or used spectacles every day, and instead only did a casual amount of reading or close-work, then a quizzer, with its simpler construction, fewer parts, and smaller size, was generally considered to be a better, and cheaper, selection!
What’s the Difference Between a Quizzer and a Monocle?
Ever since I started carrying and using my quizzers (which is on a daily basis, thanks to my aforementioned eye-condition), I get people who come up to me and say ‘Oh wow! A monocle, I didn’t know anybody used those anymore…‘.
I grin, and smile and nod…and do my best not to correct their misinformation – because – it’s not a monocle!
Alright, so what’s the difference, then?
A quizzing-glass and a monocle both have a single lens fitted into a frame or rim. Both lenses serve as magnifiers, or otherwise help to correct vision.
That is where the similarities END.
A quizzing-glass is a handheld device – the frame is held by the ring or handle up to the eye, like a magnifying glass, and is attached to the user’s clothing by a chain, cord or strap of some variety. When not in use, it sits in the pocket of the user’s coat or jacket or waistcoat, or hangs on a cord or ribbon around the neck, usually resting at chest-level.
On top of that, a quizzing-glass lens can be almost any shape – round, oval, hexagonal, octagonal…even square! Since it doesn’t have to fit into the user’s eye-socket, the shape or even the size of the lens and the frame around it really doesn’t matter. By comparison, a monocle’s lens is always a perfect circle – it has to be, in order to fit into the user’s eye-socket, which is how a monocle is worn.
Monocles fit into the user’s eye-socket through friction. You pop it in, and the friction of your eyebrow resting and pressing against the top of the monocle holds it against your cheekbone, keeping the monocle in place. In cheaper monocles, which are just plain glass, the edge of the lens is smoothed off to make it more comfortable to wear.
On more expensive monocles, which come with frames and rims, seating the monocle in the eye-socket is done with the aid of two protruding shelves or ledges affixed to the edge of the frame, called ‘galleries’. A monocle has two galleries – one for the top of your eye-socket, and one for the bottom. You raise your eyebrow, pop in your monocle and then relax your facial muscles. The tension of your eye-socket pressing or resting against the monocle-galleries should be enough – if the monocle is sized and fitted correctly – to hold it in place.
The End of the Quizzing Glass
While monocles and quizzing-glasses were, for a time, equally popular, quizzing glasses died out in the 1800s, and by the turn of the 20th century, were a complete anachronism. Their demise is due chiefly to the fact that they were a fashion accessory, rather than being an actual vision-correction device, such as a monocle is designed to be. As fashions changed to be less frivolous and flamboyant to more straitlaced and tidy, people with eyesight problems chose to use lorgnettes or even modern-style temple-glasses to correct their eyesight, rather than fiddling around with a quizzing-glass. Monocles and modern spectacles had the advantage that while worn, they could leave both hands free to work.
By comparison to the demise of the quizzing-glass, the monocle remains in use today. Although it’s largely seen as a quaint holdover from the Edwardian era, the stereotypical eyepiece of well-bred, public-school-educated upper-class men, you can still buy – and even have prescribed for you – monocles which are brand-new. Most wearers are people who have poor vision in just one eye, and for whom a pair of spectacles isn’t strictly necessary.
I want to Buy a Quizzing Glass!
Quizzing glasses can be hard to find. After all, they haven’t been manufactured in the best part of nearly 200 years! They’re typically made of silver, gold, or pinchbeck (a type of really shiny brass). They were most common from the early 1700s up to the mid-1800s (when various types of spectacles and monocles replaced them in popularity). So, if you want to buy one, what do you need to look out for?
First thing’s first – you need to check the lens. The lens should be clean, clear and without cracks, scratches or chips. Test it for magnification power and see if you’re comfortable with the strength provided. Unless you have the facilities, contacts or the money to pay for someone to grind you a new magnifying lens, discard any quizzers with overly-scratched/chipped lenses.
Next thing to check is the condition of the frame or rim. In general, these should be alright, but you can find some (as I certainly have, in the past) which were bent or damaged. This can cause the lens to sit improperly, or even fall out, so rivets, screws and the edges of frames should all be checked for integrity. While you’re at it, examine any holding-loops or handles for issues like dents, cracks, warping or bending, and loose fitting parts. Just keep in mind that some holding-loops are meant to pivot and swing around, so don’t worry if they swivel back and forth.
How Much do Quizzing Glasses Cost?
Due to their rarity, quizzers are fairly expensive. Although some historical reenactment companies do manufacture modern quizzers in antique style, to purchase an actual Georgian-era quizzer will set you back quite a bit, anywhere from $100 – $300 for a silver one in variable condition (which is not too bad a price to pay) up to $400 – $600+ for one in solid gold. And that’s provided you don’t have to pay for the lens to be replaced, or for the frame to be repaired.
Quizzers were typically attached to the body of the wearer using a silk ribbon or lanyard. Since I wear mine in my upper waistcoat-pockets, I use simple pocketwatch chains (which is an option, if you choose to wear them that way). To stop them from swinging around and damaging the glass, keep your quizzer tucked out of the way (under your shirt or in your jacket pocket) when not using it.
A few weeks ago, I attended the annual Melbourne Pen Show, the oldest continuous collector’s and dealer’s fair of writing equipment, writing accessories and antiques in the southern hemisphere. This year was our 20th anniversary!
I sold quite a few things at the show – not just pens, but also silverware and antiques. Eager to see what else was on offer, I left a friend to guard my sales table, and went off to have a look around. Ironically, for something labeled as a pen show, I didn’t find any pens which excited me enough, in a price-range I was comfortable with, to actually buy. But while poking around through all the related offerings of inkwells, ink bottles, leathergoods, diaries, desk accessories and assorted antiques, I did find a row of rather crusty old pocketknives.
None of them were particularly appealing, but after sifting through all the detritus, I came across a rather handsome specimen with nickel-silver bolsters, and clad all over in lovely shimmering, glossy mother of pearl scales. Like all the other knives, this one was crusted and grimy and dare I say it, rather overpriced, but I perceived that, with a bit of effort, it could be turned into something both elegant, and useful.
A good bit of haggling managed to chip the price down and I bought it feeling happy for myself. Within just a few minutes of walking off with it and settling back behind my own sales table at the fair, I whipped out the knife and started thinking over what would need to be done to the knife to restore it to something resembling working condition…because it certainly wasn’t!
The knife was a standard, palm-sized slipjoint penknife, somewhat on the smaller end of medium, with two opposing blades contained within a pair of brass liners and a single backspring underneath, ornamented with nickel-silver bolsters and thick slabs of mother of pearl between, on either side. It could be a very attractive knife – if only the blades would open without ripping your fingernails out by the roots, and could cut anything worth a damn, without giving you tetanus at the same time, from all the surface-rust on the steel.
Who made the Knife?
The maker’s mark: Ed. Wusthof.
The knife was manufactured in the capital of European cutlery – the German town of Solingen – by the centuries old firm of Wusthof. Established in 1814, the Wusthof cutlery firm is still owned and operated by the Wusthof family, over two centuries after it was founded! Although more famous today for making kitchen-knives, it was common in the old days for cutlers to make all kinds of blades from scissors to razors, pocket-knives to silverware. Specialising in one particular type of blade (like what most companies do now) is a relatively recent phenomenon. Being a Solingen knife, I knew I’d bought something of unquestioned quality – it would have to be, if the company’s still family-run after 200 years!
Cleaning, cleaning, and…more cleaning
In my many years of collecting and tinkering with antiques, it’s long been my experience that the vast majority of antiques that are purchased from someplace – be it a fair, online, at an antiques shop, or from someone’s barn in the middle of nowhere – only require ‘restoration’ or ‘repairs’, and are ‘broken’ or ‘don’t work’ – not because they ARE broken, or don’t work, but rather, because they simply haven’t been cleaned. In decades!
Watches, clocks, sewing machines, typewriters, fountain pens, cars, record-players…anything, really…that’s been used rough and put away wet, as they say…will tend to seize up and not work after several years of use and absolutely no maintenance. The same goes for pocketknives.
Once I got the knife home, I opened it up and flooded it with oil. I stuffed it full of tissue-paper and started rubbing and scraping away at the inside of the knife. Even this half-hearted attempt at cleaning the knife yielded amazing…and…frankly…revolting…results! After their brief spelunk into the dark cavities of the knife, the tissues returned to the surfaceworld clagged up and caked in filth! Black, brown, sludgy GUNK all over!
Now came the really messy bit…removing all this grime.
Working out the Grime
Unless you have all the right tools, removing 60 years of encrusted grime and gunk (the accumulated decades of dust, pocket-lint, dead skin, coagulated oil and god knows what else) from the inside of a pocketknife can be a long, slow, sticky, oily and very, very, VERY messy process. Most people don’t have these tools…like me…and so you gotta restore the knife without them, the long way around…and this can take days.
The only way to do this is to repeatedly flood the knife with oil (I suggest sewing machine oil, but if you can stand the smell, WD-40 works as well, but keep in mind, you will be using a LOT of it, so best to get a lubricant that doesn’t smell…) and then work the blades open and shut, over and over and over again.
The oil seeps into the deepest nooks and crannies of the knife and dilutes the grime and crud that’s stuck inside the springs, pivots and liners. Opening and closing the knife the literally thousands of times that this will require, works the grime loose and it seeps out the bottom of the knife through the backspring with each working of the blades.
Get some tissues, paper-towels or toilet-paper. Fold it thick and lay it on a hard surface like a tabletop. Rub the knife – spring-side down – against the paper. Press it hard into the paper and rub it vigorously back and forth. The capillary action of the oil seeping out of the knife into the paper draws out all the grime stuck inside the springs and pivots. Now lift up the knife and stare in horror and revulsion at the THICK BLACK GREASY LINES on the paper. This is the grime that’s inside the knife which you MUST remove if the knife is to work properly.
Ever wondered why your pocketknife keeps jamming? This is why! All this gunk and grime, flushed out from between the springs and pivots with copious amounts of oil, represents just 15 minutes of cleaning, in a process that took EIGHT DAYS to complete.
“But this takes DAYS!!” I hear you say. “Can’t you just lubricate the pivots and have done with it!?”
Sure. You can. But you’re only lubricating the grime that’s stuck inside the knife. Once the oil dries up, the grime dries up, sticks to the springs and pivots all over again, and turns to glue. It fuses the blades shut through sheer friction and you’re back to square one all over again. The only way to get the knife working properly is to get ALL that crud out. And the only way to do that is to flush it through with oil.
“Can’t you speed it up somehow?”
Not unless you can rip the knife apart, clean it, and then competently put it back together. Using an ultrasonic cleaner does help somewhat, but it’s only effective once the grime has already been loosened. Ultrasonic cleaners work by vibrating and generating thousands of tiny bubbles that burst and explode against anything they come in contact with (like a knife placed inside an ultrasonic bath).
These thousands of explosions flush out and dislodge any grime and gunk they come into contact with. But it only works if the bubbles can reach the grime – in this case, the grime is trapped deep inside the knife. For the cleaner to be effective, you need to work the grime loose, first.
The knife is clean once all this grime has been removed from all the pivot points, gullies, crevices and chokepoints inside the spring mechanism. When the oil coming out of the knife is clear (or as clear as you can get it), and the blades swing open and shut smoothly with little (if any) resistance, then the knife is clean. If the blades keep jerking open and shut, then it needs more cleaning. You do not want jerky, unpredictable blades in your pocketknife AFTER you’ve sharpened those same blades – they become a serious safety risk!
Removing the Chip
As elegant as the knife was (or as elegant as I perceived it would be, after I was done with it), there was no hiding the fact that the blade had a tiny, but noticeable chip along its length. It was a tiny chip – probably less than a millimeter, but it was a chip, nonetheless, and I knew that it would be pointless to try and sharpen or use the knife if the chip wasn’t dealt with. The chip is a weak-spot in the blade, but it’s also an annoyance and a safety risk. And it prevents you from cutting anything properly, since you don’t have a straight, clean edge.
The chip in the blade (circled in blue) was tiny – barely a millimeter deep, but its presence was enough to effect the cutting ability of the knife, and so had to be removed.
The only way to remove the chip was to grind the blade down to the same level as the end of the chip. That’s right – you have to physically remove metal from the blade. Obviously, the bigger the chip, the more metal you have to remove, so ideally, any knives you buy should have no chips at all, or if they do, then they should be tiny chips like this, where grinding down the blade doesn’t affect it so badly.
Out came the sharpening stones!
I picked out the roughest sharpening stone I had. I laid it down and started grinding the blade back and forth, heel to toe along the stone in a sawing or slicing action. The aim was to slowly grind down the metal until the edge of the blade met the top of the chip, thereby eliminating it. Obviously to do this well, the blade needs to be level on the grinding stone, or else you end up with a wonky-looking blade. So if you do have to do this, make sure the blade’s edge is level against the stone as you grind. Stop every few strokes to check progress and stop grinding entirely when the chip is ALMOST gone.
Once you reach that stage, regular sharpening of the now dulled knife-edge should remove the rest of the chip and restore the blade to its proper profile.
The same spot on the blade, after the chip was ground out on a stone. Nice and straight again!
Keep in mind that, because the only way to remove a chip or nick in the blade is to remove the metal around the chip, smaller chips are easier to remove from blades than larger chips. A knife with a big chips in the blade should generally be avoided.
Polishing the Blades
Knives which are this old are typically made of carbon steel. That means that they’re very susceptible to rusting. Back in the old days, the way to stop this was to give the blades a protective coating. 60 or 70 years ago or more, this was accomplished by plating the blades in a non-corrosive metal…like nickel. Nickel not only gave the knife a sheeny silver shine, but it also prevented the blades and other steel parts of the knife from corroding.
50, 70, 100 years later, and all that nickel-plating is gone. The blades will probably be growing rust and starting to pit, by now. Heavy rusting and pitting on blades should be red-alert signs that the knife is not to be touched, let alone purchased, but light surface rust can generally be removed by careful polishing.
To do this, you’ll need fine-grit sandpaper of varying degrees of roughness, and a polishing compound of your choice (or if you don’t want to use a metal polish, the oil that you used to loosen out the grime inside the springs and pivots can also be used).
With enough persistence, and the right degrees of abrasiveness, a combination of fine sandpaper and a lubricating/polishing liquid can restore a knife’s blades to a stunning shine. If you really put effort into it, you can even get a glossy, mirror finish, but don’t forget that your main task is to remove the rust.
Sharpening the Blades
Once you’re done removing the grime from the springs and pivots and got the blades opening and closing smoothly, once you’ve removed any chips from the blades and have given them a good polish, the last step is to sharpen the blades. I always leave blade sharpening as the last step to prevent any nasty cuts during the cleaning process.
There’s a million articles on the internet about how to sharpen everything from corkscrews to axes, so I won’t go into the intricacies of the action, but I will say that a pocketknife has been sufficiently sharpened when you can slice cleanly through a sheet of paper or cardboard from point to shank, without the blade sticking to, or tearing up, the paper or card as it makes the cut.
The main blade.
Hold the edge of the sheet of paper or cardboard in the thumb and index finger of your left hand, three or four inches from the corner. Holding your knife in your right hand, slice downwards, from the edge of the paper ahead of your fingers, from one side of the sheet to the other. A sharp knife will cut cleanly into the edge of the paper, through the middle and down to the bottom, the whole length of the blade without stopping. You should be able to do this really fast. If the blade sticks, jams, catches or fails to cut in any way, or if it tears the paper in half while this happens, then it’s not sharp enough.
Once the blades have been thoroughly sharpened, then your knife is ready for use!
The smaller pen-blade.
This is the process that I went through to restore this knife back to working condition. It was a long, drawn out process that took over a week (removing 60, 70 years of grime was never going to be easy!), but it was worth it. Now I have another beautiful vintage pocketknife to add to my collection.
Keeping it Clean and Sharp
Once you’ve finished the arduous task of restoring your pocketknife, it’s important to keep it in good condition. Don’t force the blades, always keep your knife dry, and every now and then (not often, once or twice a year should be enough, if you use it regularly), flush out the springs and pivots with oil again to keep the action smooth and free of grime. And don’t forget to sharpen it – ideally after any heavy use, if you feel that the blades are starting to lose their edges. Used correctly, a sharp knife is safer than a blunt one.
