Barn Find - What Is It - 1940's? Mystery Device Teardown!

#restoration #electronics #repair

[patmancrowley]

When my grandfather, God Bless his soul, went to work as an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch back in the 1920's thereabouts, the flash bulbs would screw into the flash fitting like your standard light bulb. One of the reporters was an occasional drunkard so someone, while the reporter in question was out drinking, snuck into the reporters apartment and replaced all of the light bulbs with flash bulbs. I still chuckle at the thought of his surprised reaction. What a hoot. What a beautiful practical joke!

[acefeeley]

My wife's grandfather was a chicken farmer in Massachusetts.
She says he checked the eggs with a bright light that came out of a wooden box with a carry handle on it.
The light was green as well.
She was under the impression that the green light wavelength was better for checking out what was inside the egg.

[ronbolak]

This does appear to be an old egg candler and the green lens makes it easy on the eyes and better for blood detection.l

[Driver-UK]

Absolutely fascinating ! We need more of this . I had to avoid looking at the comments first to see what it is .

[vkzen-rfdesign]

initial guess is a railway indicator lamp and possibly repurposed as an egg candler. the egg candler we had was similar but powered and mounted differently.

[davidg]

I'm glad I watched to the end, I had no idea what that was. But then I never raised chickens, my grandfathers would have recognized that egg candler instantly. At first I was thinking sun lamp and the transformer was a ballast, but nope, not at 6 volts, and a tiny green filter.

Someone in high school (1970's) found a whole box of those Edison base flash bulbs and had great fun tormenting the custodian by screwing them into light sockets in various maintenance areas. The custodian started inspecting every bulb with a flashlight before turning it on. If you had photography equipment those bulbs would fire on D cells, no AC power required.

[BillCipher-qo]

Oh yeah this thing, I remember these crazy things. That is a low voltage illuminated egg candle. I bought one of these things way back in the day, I think back when I was, what, 300, 330 years old, or something? Anyhow, it works like this: That great big round hole in the side is so that you can keep this lamp on for up to hours at a time without large amounts of heat building up. The inside is an uncolored standard metal that will reflect the light any which way. Eventually, the light makes its way out of two holes. The heat vent, and the focusing lens. The focusing lens is to be pointing straight up. You see those four holes on the red mounting plate? That plate is to be mounted to a wall nearby a standard edison outlet. You would then use the device to check if eggs being collected for market have been fertilized or not. If they have, there'll be an unborn chicken inside and you'll see the outline. If not, you just made an egg glow briefly. This is to prevent taking the fertilized eggs out to market by accident. The reason the bulb is so low voltage is because if you used any higher voltage bulb, the vent hole wouldn't be enough to prevent it heating up. And you don't want to put an egg on a hot lamp if it's going out to market, that'll ruin its sale value and taste. I hope this explains it fully to you.

[dashcamandy]

I had a Kodak Instamatic that used flashcubes. My Fisher Price 110mm camera used the Flip Flash cartridges.

In high school marching band one year, our field show's theme was the music of John Williams. Our drum solo was a medley of Star Wars songs, and at the climactic moment every band member triggered a flashcube taped to their instrument with a paperclip to represent the explosion of the Death Star and scattered across the field like shrapnel. Sounds beautiful, looked amazing from the stands. Absolute crowd-pleaser.

From my perspective: tip the snare drum back, fumble with the paperclip on the flashcube that is taped to the front shell, set it off in my eyes, spin around (holding the drum tipped back still) and run like mad to the opposite sideline in seconds flat. Hope I ended up in the right "cluster" of bandmates so that I could make my next mark as the entire band reformed - and now the drum major is somewhere in the temporary blind spot. 🤣

[CaptainZuurpruim]

I Love that kind of very old stuff. The movement of the lamp is probably to find the perfect spot of the bulb wrt the reflector (the housing). This reflector acts more or less is a parabola-mirror. Quite neat to optimise the output!

[mr_mopar]

Never seen one of those large flash bulbs. I do however remember and probably used the flash cubes. Thanks for sharing.

[DanielGBenesScienceShows]

I was mesmerized by the old square flash cubes. As a kid I discovered it was fun to set them off with a capacitor charged by a 9v. The charged capacitor seemed more magical than just the battery. My friends thought I was a wizard. (Funny that later in life I would be called a “modern day” Mr. Wizard by a couple of TV networks). My grandmother was pretty forgiving, considering how many of her flash cubes I popped off.

[rawmilkmike]

I'm 70 and my first new US camera in around 1970 had flash cubes. I started buying and using older cameras from thrift stores. They used larger flash bulbs but not as big as that one.

[richardmassoth]

I also go along with the egg candling device. Perhaps the colored glass lens was a method to deal with different colored eggshells, to obtain a more consistent appearance from the egg. The focusing mechanism would have perhaps been to be able to candle eggs from large to small (e.g., quail to chicken to duck to turkey) eggs and cover the entire egg. As for the stand, that looks like one style of ring stand clamp base that the transformer is mounted on. It could be mounted on a bench or on the wall. You don't want to let an incubated egg cool too much when candling, and you don't want to sell eggs that have started developing a blood spot, so a bright light with little heat is ideal. Modern egg candling devices use 800 lumens of white light from an LED to solve some of the issues that this antique attempted to solve.

As for the flash bulbs, they were filled with a magnesium alloy wire that literally burned. The bulbs got quite hot while flashing. The large bulb you have would likely have been used in a photography studio, and it's just a single-use bulb. Even with needing to carry lots of bulbs, it still beats the use of the even older flash powder technology for photography.

[challengeraircraftadventures]

Egg Candling lamp. I remember those way back in the 60's when I was a wee lad.

[foureyedchick]

I think that this is some sort of stage light for use in theatres in the earlier half of the 20th century. However, it is probably not older than the 1950s. Why? Because the primary of the transformer is rated at 120v. In the 1950s, America was still using 110v, and started transitioning to 120v.

[annfarmer]

I remember the cube flashes, there also used to be a bar of 5 single use flashes that was kind of awkward when on top of some of the smaller 120 film cameras...The old polaroids too.
I used to love looking at the blue glass cube flashes when they were spent. They looked like ice cubes to me how the center had all these fine opaque crystal like white structures, then as it got closer to the perimeter of the cube it would be the "clear" blue glass and the many cracks (fractures).... Reminded me of ice cubes. Each one was unique in it's explosion pattern. I loved the noise that they made too. A high frequency build up noise to a poof crunch. Then we got treated to a spots show for a minute or two.
I believe the bulb style came in a blue color for a bit as well.
The good old You couldn't tell how your pictures turned out till they came back from the developers about a week or so after dropping off the film., .... Had to have trust in your ability with a camera, and patience to wait out development time. No instant reward., ... No Unless you wanted a closeup out of focus picture of the inside of your nostril. Nobody wasted money on risky shots like that.
Physical photo albums, , , , slide projector shows after Sunday family dinner..., . Another upside down one?!
Shadow puppets while the carousel was changed.
Wish I could go back to visit just one of those nights.

[garyrobinson]

Perhaps a stage spotlight, with dpot focusing capability ?

[Electronics-Rocks]

I am from a farming family in the UK & never used anything like that.
I have sat down checking eggs for fertilisation on a couple of farms.
The new kit to do this is very interesting with computer vision.

[danw]

Old egg candler!😉 Back in the 1960's there was an old chicken farm up the road from us that had several of these (the American variant anyway) and they would run on electric or batteries, if commercial line voltage wasn't available.

[artadams]

I’m good with the egg candler except for the size of it and the green lens. Ours was a large wooden chalk box with a less than egg size hole in the sliding top and a 40 watt 6 volt bulb inside.
In later years we had 120 volts and added shelves on two sides, one for fresh eggs and the other for ‘candled’ eggs.
The shelves held the wooden 12doz box egg separators …
The fertilized ones were marked and went back out to the broodie’s and the passed ones were taken to Mr. Poad at the store to trade or for credit. (Sometimes even for cash or candy !!!)