Steve shows me two of his lamps, including an art deco lantern and a Canadian Coleman.

He first shows us an art deco lantern made by American Gas Machine Company, and then shows us a Coleman lantern made in Canada, which is different in several ways from their American-made lamps.

Transcript:

“Hey, Steve. So, what do you got there, what do you got there on the table, man? Tell me about it.

This is approximately 1938. Um, it’s made by the American Gas Machine Lighting Company. It is not a Coleman. Uh, pretty rare. It’s the larger version. They have a smaller version. I actually have six of ‘em. Um, the glass in this is irreplaceable. You, uh, you will never find this glass that’s in here. It’s called an Art Deco because of the era and because of the style. There, if you look at the vent, uh, this up here, it’s all, it’s very Deco-looking. And, uh, extremely desirable. The difficulty with these is the tank is usually stress-cracked. And all of the examples I have are not. They all run. Uh, I have had ‘em with stress cracks and I’ve actually had to piece ‘em together to make one complete one. Um, but not this one. This one is the way I found it, and it’s quite a nice lamp. And over here if you look, this is a Coleman. The model is a 635. Um, this is a Canadian-made lantern, not U.S.. And the cool thing about the Canadians is they kinda went their own way with a lot of things. And one of them is uh color and sometimes design. So, in particular, the internal part, this metal part that holds everything, um is their design. The U.S. never produced that. And the other really cool thing is they made this in a chrome version. And then sometimes you get a painted one with a lot of paint loss and as you can see in this area there’s actually chrome showing through the paint. So, if you’re not a real purist, you can strip the paint off and polish, and you’ll have a very shiny chrome lantern.

Beautiful. Yeah.

And the other cool thing is um they used paper decals. The U.S. never used paper decals.

Why is that?

Um, I don’t really know the reason, but like I say, Canada just seemed to march to the beat of their own drum. They, they, they had several models that the U.S. never produced, um, and in my opinion many of them ran much better than the U.S. models.”