In 1859, drillers in Pennsylvania brought in the nation’s first producing oil well, an event that was to alter radically the lives of generations of Americans. The first revolution achieved by this versatile new fuel was not in mechanical power, but in lighting. A working oil field made possible the manufacture of kerosene, a promising coal and petroleum-based illuminant that had been patented in New York in 1854 but had not been put into production because of the scarcity of one of its principal ingredients. Kerosene burned more brightly, steadily, and efficiently than almost any known fuel except gas, which suffered from the twin disadvantages of requiring immovable fixtures in the wall or ceiling, and of being generally unavailable outside large urban areas. The abundance of petroleum from the Pennsylvania fields made kerosene one of the cheapest fuels available, and by the mid-1860s, its use had far outstripped that of gas lighting. In many rural areas, it remained the only practical form of household lighting until electrification of these areas in the 1930s. [Illustration: Figure 26. Student lamp chimney. This glass was used in reading lamps like those illustrated in Figure 27. The kerosene-fueled student lamp was an 1863 Prussian design that became popular in the United States in the 1870s.] Early kerosene lamps often resembled the oil lamps of the first half of the century, and many were oil lamps converted to kerosene. Among the new designs that became popular in the 1870s was the adjustable student or reading lamp (Figs. 26 and 27), an 1863 Prussian invention used through the early twentieth century. In the 1880s decorated lamp chimneys came into fashion. One of the earliest, simplest, and most enduring of these styles was the familiar “pearl top” chimney rim, patented by the George A. Macbeth Company in 1883 (Fig. 28). Similar crimped rims were produced by the Thomas Evans Company, which in 1899 merged with Macbeth to become, by virtue of a semiautomatic lamp chimney machine, the nation’s largest glass chimney manufacturer. Demand for glass lamp chimneys was curtailed by the spread of electric power in the early twentieth century, and, although it continued in production, the lamp chimney industry did not fully mechanize until after the 1920s. [Illustration: Figure 27. Kerosene student and piano lamp, reproduced from 1895 and 1907 department store catalogues.] [Illustration: Figure 28. “Pearl top” and crimped lamp chimneys. The true pearl top rim on the far left was patented by the George A. Macbeth Co. in 1883. The variations shown on the right became popular about the same time.] LABORATORY GLASS