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This week I repaired an floor lamp that had been in my family for about a hundred years. It may be the oldest thing I own. I remember that lamp from my grandparent’s living room. The lamp was one of the items that we got from my mother when she passed a little over a year ago. It has been in our living room for over a year but hasn’t been usable. The reason it hasn’t been usable was that it has a “mogul” or “E39” base as opposed to the standard “E26” base the most popular bulb. For The “E” is for Edison and the number is the diameter in millimeters. The E39 is 13 mm bigger diameter than the E26
The Mogul base was popular in the 1920s and 30s, which fits with my estimate that the lamp is 100 years old. They were originally introduced for stage lighting and street lights. Mogul bulbs and lamps with mogul bases were readily available for residential use. One example was the “Mogul Lamp“. Unfortunately, these bulbs are getting harder and harder to find. We also wanted to move towards LED lamps and I could only find one LED bulb with a mugul base, and it didn’t fit in the lamp.
Further complicating the effort, the lamp also has a three-way switch. Now get your minds out of the gutter in this case a three-way means that the bulb has three levels of brightness and the switch will go from one to the other.
Ultimately I had to conclude that the only way to make this lamp usable was going to be to rewire the lamp and replace the socket with a medium or E26 socket
As I was taking it apart to figure out exactly which parts I was going to need something seemed strangely familiar and I am overwhelmed by the impression that I have rewired this lamp before many many years ago. The the electric cord in the lamp was certainly not the original and it looked very much like the type of thing that I would have done in my early twenties while I was living with my parents.
Replacing the E39 with an E26 wasn’t quite as straight forward as I had hoped. But luckily I had some help. First I want to give a shout out to the friendly hardware guy at our local Dale Hardware. I don’t know his name but the guy found me the right part at MyLampParts.com
The other thing of interest is that we have two grapevines growing now. When we moved into the house there was a grapevine but it produced very small grapes and it died pretty quickly. We had dogs and we were busy plus I never understood what it was doing there it was surrounded by all these super delicate ferns and it was under a shaded canopy. To the best of my knowledge grapes are not supposed to be shaded, they need direct sun.
But I saw them when we first looked the house and I took that as a good sign. I grew up with a grapevine in our backyard. It produced really horrible tasting grapes that my grandfather made fairly horrible tasting wine from but it got us all drunk and that was all that matters
This year Kate and I have planted two grapevines one red flame grape and one green Niagara grape these are both table grapes and we’re looking forward to them the flames have been doing fine from planting but I had thought that I had killed the Niagara line I actually dropped a 4×4 on top of it while we were trying to build the trellis oops well I called the nursery and they were out of the vines it was too late in the year I’m so they suggested that I just leave it there and see if it comes up again as Niagara Vines are pretty Hardy and it turns out that it did an amazing story of resilience that little mind the seeds The Roots just must have taken and it’s been pushing up leaves and looking great
Yet another story of resilience we’re probably not going to see any grapes this year as grapes only fruit off of the previous years branches
This really wasn’t something I was planning to do and I am not 100% sure how I feel about it but at least for right now I feel pretty good.
Haven’t really planted that way this way but I think it feels good to be bringing these pieces of my past and my heritage a little bit more into my life
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