The Invention of Argand’s Oil Lamp

A Swiss chemist, François Pierre Ami Argand (1750-1803), succeeded in Paris around 1783 in significantly improving the flame's burning performance by supplying much more air to the flame. He recognized and consistently used the principle of better combustion through the "double air supply" to the wick from outside and inside. To do this, he reshaped the rather narrow flat wick, which had been developed a few years earlier by a Frenchman named Léger* into a large, tubular, hollow wick and attached it to a metal tube in a moveable manner. Doing this he changed the simple flame of a conventional wick to a wider, hollow, cylindrical flame. This enabled him not only to considerably expand the area of the wick to be burned, but also to introduce an additional amount of air from below through the inner part of the tubular wick.

* Note: The date of Léger's invention of the flat wick is given differently in the literature. Bernard Mahot gives the date as 1766 (book: Les lampes à huile; page 140); Anton Kaim gives it as 1773 (book: The Evolution of the Kerosene Mantle Burner, second edition; page 11) and finally Dr. Werner Touché gives it as 1783 (book: Leuchtende Vergangenheit, second edition; page 69). I chose Anton Kaim's 1773 as the more probable date, as it is taken from a museum publication in Arnhem (Netherlands).

Argand's novel oil burner
Left: The tube-like, hollow flame of the burner as a sketch
Middle: Schematic representation of the burner with the air currents
Right: Argand's improved oil lamp (copper engraving from "Journal des Luxus und der Moden" of 1788; only 5 years after Argand's invention).

The flame thus received a double air supply, one from the outside of the flame through the surrounding air, and one from the inside of the flame through the wick tube that is open at the bottom. In order to improve the effect of the air supply even further, Ami Argand also made the second ingenious invention, namely the use of the cylindrical chimney, a glass cylinder, above the flame. An attached tube creates a powerful air movement upwards, similar to a chimney, as the air, which is strongly heated by the flame, immediately rises upwards.

A Frenchman named L’Ange** (or Lange as sometimes written) was able to improve the simple glass chimney by remodelling the glass narrower from the height of the flame ("shoulder chimney"; see Shoulder Chimneys). This made the outside draft at the flame even stronger. With these two inventions, namely the tubular wick in a special burner, which can draw in air from below, and the glass chimney above the flame, which causes a powerful upward draft, Argand was able to revolutionize artificial lighting of mankind after thousands of years. He helped the flame of the oil lamp to a much better combustion and thus to a higher brightness! His burner even allowed the height and thus the brightness of the flame to be changed at will by moving the wick up or down using a lever, which until then had only been achieved by manually pulling out the end of the wick.

** Note: L'Ange was one of Ami Argand's opponents. Two of his acquaintances, the Frenchmen L'Ange and Quinquet, had tried to market his great invention in France under their own name after Argand had travelled to Great Britain in 1784 to find business partners and producers for his lamp. He was also immediately granted a patent for his invention there. When he returned to France, Argand had to litigate against his two opponents for a long time. Finally, he was recognised as the actual inventor. However, he had to share the subsequent patent of 1787 with L'Ange, since the invention of the better shoulder glass chimney was awarded to the latter. The irony of history: Quinquet as the second opponent, who had actually contributed nothing at all to these inventions, still lives today as the eponym for French student lamps, which are still called "Quinquet" in France.

Left: A simple Argand lamp from about 1790 with a straight glass chimney
Middle: The burner of a French student lamp ("quinquet") without glass chimney
Right: The same burner with an attached shoulder chimney
(All three photos by Ara Kebapcioglu, Paris)

Argand's oil lamp caused a sensation. In a very short time, many lamps with his special burner were manufactured in France and Great Britain. These lamps were, of course, expensive, elaborately decorated prestige objects that only wealthy households could afford.

Later Improvements

All fatty oils (vegetable as well as animal) have one disadvantage: they are not very thin and rise relatively slowly through the wick; technically speaking: their creeping and flow speed upwards through the capillaries of the wick (these are the narrow cavities between the tissue threads) is rather modest. As long as the burning end of the wick was held directly on the surface of the oil, as happened thousands of years in primitive oil lamps, there was enough oil to burn at the end of the wick. The novel oil lamps based on Argand’s principle, however, did not allow the flame to always float directly on the oil surface. The oil burned in a special, fixed burner, and the burning end of the wick was somewhat removed from the oil surface. In particular, when the amount of oil in the container below the burner became less and less as a result of the burning process, less and less oil rose through the capillaries of the wick upwards; and the flame grew weaker and weaker.

Therefore, attempts were made to improve the upward oil supply to the burning wick by various methods. One of the most successful was the French watchmaker Guillaume Carcel (1750-1812), who around 1800 developed a piston pump that was driven by a spring clock and constantly pumped the oil upwards. The excess amount of oil that reached the wick flowed back to the container. Carcel lamps were made for quite a long time, although they were very expensive and fairly prone to repair.

Most successful, however, was Charles Louis Felix Franchot (1809-1881), a French mechanic who invented a complicated system in Paris in 1836, which consisted of a flexible leather piston, a spiral spring that exerts pressure on this piston, and a specially equipped telescopic tube, causing the oil to flow up to the wick (for the function of his invention see Difference of Kerosene/Paraffin Lamps and Moderator Oil Lamps). The ingenious side of his invention was that a thin, tapered pin in the tube allowed the same amount of oil to flow upwards, regardless of the changing pressure of the spiral spring and the amount of oil remaining below the leather piston in the reservoir. This resulted in a constant amount of oil that was immediately available for burning on the wick. To do this, the spring that applied the pressure had to be tightened with a key after a few hours. These oil lamps were called Moderator lamps (lampe à modérateur in French) because the thin pin (which was called “modérateur” by the way and which gave these lamps the name) made it possible to “moderate” the amount of oil at the top of the wick end. These lamps represented the pinnacle of improvements to oil lamps, and for a few decades, even after the advent of kerosene/paraffin lamps, they were still produced in large quantities, mainly in France.

The burner of a Moderator oil lamp
Left: Burner without attached decorative collar and glass chimney
Middle: Burner with the decorative collar and shoulder chimney
Right: Burner with flame
(All three photos by Ara Kebapcioglu, Paris)

Well, the Argand lamps as well as the Carcel and Moderator lamps are not kerosene/paraffin lamps, but real oil lamps, since they only serve to burn vegetable oils (such as rapeseed oil or olive oil), albeit in much improved type.