1888 – 94 Hinge Dash

This Hinge lantern is one of the earliest E.T. Wright & Co. lantern designs. It was made from 1888 until they switched to using square tubes in 1894. Interestingly, ETW did not put filler caps on these lanterns, even though it was industry standard. They didn’t even put fillers on the hinge lanterns they made past 1900. ETW made their lanterns using the 1883 Thomas Phillips patent until 1894, when Edwin Wright patented his own version of the hinge lantern. Thomas Phillips was from Orillia, Ontario, his patent was used by ETW in Canada and Gael Hinks in Great Britain.

This particular lantern has the ‘dash’ attachment. A dash lantern was made to work as a headlight that attaches to a dashboard of a wagon. Unknown to a lot of people, the dashboards in our cars are named after carriages and wagons from long ago. It was called that because it blocked the dirt flying up from horses while they were ‘dashing’.

The Globe

The globe in this lantern is the original ETW curved glass, much like the Eclectic Security Tubular Lantern globe, however the curve on the ETW globes is not as pronounced as that one. An oddity about this globe is on the reverse it’s marked “Perfection”, I have never heard of the Perfection lantern made by E.T. Wright. If you know of that lantern I would certain love to hear from you!

This lantern is in virtually mint condition with incredible amounts of original tinning left, and almost no pitting to be found. Only issues to note is the handle I had to recreate due to it being missing when I got it. I used catalogue cuts to shape it as closely to original as I could. There are some minor dents and bending, however nothing really noteworthy. This lantern was definitely well taken care of through it’s life.