Adlake: The Company That Never Held Its Own Founding Patent

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 20, 2026

William Westlake patented the removable-globe lantern mechanism in his own name, in 1870 and again in 1873 — years before any company called Adams & Westlake existed. The ADLAKE trademark the company filed in 1919 has outlived every one of those patents, and even outlived a second trademark the company let lapse.

The patents were never the company's

In October 1870, a Chicago metalworker named William Westlake walked two lantern patents through the U.S. Patent Office. Neither one belonged to a company. There wasn't one to speak of yet — not one carrying his name, anyway.

US Patent 108,221 and US Patent 108,222, both titled "Improvement in Lanterns," issued the same day, October 11, 1870. Both solve the same problem — getting a tubular lantern's glass globe in and out cleanly, without it rattling or dropping free — by two different mechanisms: one uses a removable perforated plate and a spring-mounted pin to hold a sliding globe in a cylinder; the other uses a hinged door and a removable guard-wire that frees the globe sideways once lifted clear. Neither patent lists an assignee. Three years later, Westlake refined the idea again: US Patent 142,134, filed July 28, 1873 and issued August 26 that year, attaches the globe-holder directly to the lantern's dome with two pins through inclined slots, adjustable from outside. It too names no company — just Westlake, of Chicago.

A company history maintained by the Made in Chicago Museum credits Westlake with holding "upwards of 300 patents" over his lifetime and specifically with a "removable globe lantern" design. One museum object record — from the McLeod History Museum, cataloguing a Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad lantern — goes further and dates that invention to 1862, eight years before the earliest patent number this guide could confirm and read in full. Whatever Westlake built or sketched in 1862, the patent office's own record of it starts in 1870, and it starts with his name alone on the filing.

A name sued the same year it was formed

Company histories place William Westlake in Chicago from 1863, working for himself until the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed his shop along with much of the rest of the city. He rebuilt anyway. J. McGregor Adams had arrived in Chicago earlier still, sent west as a salesman for a New York railroad-supply dealer — the Made in Chicago Museum calls the commonly cited 1857 founding date for the company an approximation, marking roughly when Adams got to the city rather than when any firm existed. Adams partnered with John Crerar, a fellow railroad-supply man; sources disagree on exactly when that partnership, Crerar, Adams & Co., actually formed — 1863 by one account, 1867 by another, built around a Chicago Tribune notice announcing the dissolution of a predecessor firm. Westlake joined Adams after the fire, and Adams & Westlake Company was organized as a division of Crerar, Adams & Co. in 1874.

That same year, a separate Chicago firm called Dane, Westlake & Covert lost a patent-infringement suit. A companion guide on this blog, researching the hot- and cold-blast lantern patents Dietz still advertises today, found that John H. Irwin — the actual inventor behind Dietz's "cold blast" mechanism — sued Dane, Westlake & Covert in October 1874 and won an injunction the following year. That guide flags the shared surname as a lead, stopping short of a confirmed link between the two firms; this guide went looking for a document connecting them directly and found none either. If it is the same Westlake, 1874 was the year his name both launched a lantern company and lost someone else's lantern lawsuit.

One trademark lasted 106 years, the other lasted nine

Adams & Westlake did not file for the word ADLAKE itself — a portmanteau of ADams and westLAKE — until June 2, 1919, registering it June 8, 1920 as Reg. No. 0131950, for oil, gas and candle lamps, oil-lanterns, burners and wicks. Federal trademark records list it as registered and renewed as recently as 2019, with no lapse on file. A century and six years after it was first granted, it is the same mark stamped into lanterns the Elkhart, Indiana plant still makes today.

A second ADLAKE mark tells a different story. Filed July 31, 1980 and registered August 10, 1982 as Reg. No. 1204234, it covers an illustrated oval-carrier design rather than the bare word, and it claims a first-use date of 1926 — fifty-four years before the company got around to filing it. Its goods list reads like the company's full later catalog rather than just lamps: door hardware, baggage racks, curtain fittings, electric switch and signal lamps, third-rail power pickups, navigation lights, and parts for railroad, transit, bus, trolley and streetcar fleets. That mark was cancelled March 31, 1989, under Section 8 of the Trademark Act — the routine affidavit a registration needs periodically to stay alive, which this one never got. The plain word mark on the core product survived; the broader, fancier mark covering everything else did not.

How to date an Adlake lantern

Adams & Westlake's railroad lantern line moved through a fairly traceable sequence of models.

• The Reliable, a tall lantern, ran from about 1912 into the mid-1920s. One-piece smoke domes were the only style until around 1920; after that, both one-piece and three-piece tops appear.
• The #200 Kero, introduced around 1921, was the company's first true short-globe lantern, carrying over the Reliable's three-piece top and adding a rigid bail not standard on the Reliable itself.
• The #250 Kero, introduced in the mid-1920s and made into about 1930, is substantially the #200 with a better burner, marked "No. 250" on the burner itself.
• The plain Kero — called the #300 or #400 depending on burner size — appeared around 1930 and stayed in production, through several internal design changes, for decades: a flat wire bottom gave way to a raised one around 1935; an Armspear-style lid latch and "ADLAKE KERO" stamped on the dome top replaced the earlier "Adams & Westlake Co." lid-skirt stamp after late 1945; a drain hole and restyled globe retainer appeared around 1965–66, when the font holder's bottom read "Adlake Kero.. USA Canada..PATENDED" — a misspelling baked into that era's tooling, not a modern error.
• Until roughly the mid-1960s, A&W stamped a quarter-year date into the lantern's bottom — "2-39" for the second quarter of 1939, "3-63" for the third quarter of 1963. More than 100 different railroad markings have been documented on Kero lanterns alone, from major Class I lines down to short lines.

How to tell a real one

• Check the bottom for a quarter-year date stamp. Its presence, in the "#-##" format, points to production before the mid-1960s; later and reproduction lanterns generally lack it.
• Read the lid carefully. "Adams & Westlake Co." stamped on the lid skirt marks earlier production; "ADLAKE KERO" stamped on the dome top itself marks production after roughly late 1945.
• Match the burner to the model. A burner marked "No. 250" belongs specifically to the #250 Kero — not the later plain Kero, which uses a different burner entirely.
• Compare the smoke-dome top on a tall Reliable lantern. One-piece tops predate about 1920; three-piece tops, which the short-globe Kero line then inherited, came after.
• Count the roof posts on an early switch lamp. Working through an unmarked Adlake lamp on the collecting site Collectors Weekly, a commenter using the handle Lumbar identified it as a #169 switch lamp by noting that early round-top examples had three internal vent-cone support straps, moved to the outside of the cone starting in 1908, while the later square-top version — introduced for the 1911–12 catalog as model 1112 — added a fourth support post entirely. "Four supports appeared with the square-top design," they wrote, dating the shift precisely to that catalog season.

The look-alikes

What you're looking at	How to tell it apart
Dietz short-globe "Vesta" lanterns	Adlake's chief rival in the same short-globe category, marked DIETZ rather than ADLAKE. The mechanism those lanterns advertise has its own tangled ownership story — see this blog's guide to Dietz's cold-blast patent.
"Fantasy" or commemorative Kero lanterns	Made by Adams & Westlake itself, after regular railroad service had ended, for clubs, museums and fundraisers — carrying railroad-style markings never actually used in service. Specialist collectors note these run lighter than genuine service lanterns and have sold at high prices to buyers who couldn't tell the difference; one documented example, a "G.C. & S.J. R.R." lantern, was sold by the Colorado Railroad Museum itself.
Late promotional Kero's	Norfolk Southern bought marked Kero lanterns as late as 1998 — decades after regular railroad lantern use had ended — as giveaway items, not working equipment. A railroad marking alone does not guarantee a lantern ever rode a train.

What Adlake lanterns sell for

Common lanterns and marked signal equipment sell in two different tiers.

Item	Figure	What it actually is
Adlake Kero, Canada-marked, clear Macbeth globe	$120 asking	Active eBay Buy It Now listing, checked October 2026; not a sale
Adlake pressed-steel switch lamp, circa 1906, red and green lenses	$725 realized	Sold at Dirk Soulis Auctions, October 28, 2018, from the Phil and Beverly Birk collection, against a $175–250 estimate; figure excludes buyer's premium

The gap is real. It runs between the category's most common survivor and a documented, cataloged piece from a named collection — nearly six times the asking price of an ordinary Kero, and roughly three times its own pre-sale estimate.

Where the records disagree

Sources do not agree on when Crerar, Adams & Co. — the firm Adams & Westlake grew out of — actually formed. John Crerar's own Wikipedia entry gives 1863. The Made in Chicago Museum's account instead ties the partnership's formation to 1867, citing a Chicago Tribune notice announcing the dissolution of a predecessor firm, Jesup, Kennedy & Co. Four years separate the two, and this guide found no primary document to settle which is right.

The widely repeated "1857" founding date for the company — used by dealers and collectors alike, including one Collectors Weekly commenter who states flatly that "Adlake began making lamps in 1857" — is called an approximation by the Made in Chicago Museum itself. By that museum's own account, 1857 marks roughly when J. McGregor Adams arrived in Chicago, not when any company bearing his name, or Westlake's, existed to make anything.

And the invention date itself splits the same way. The McLeod History Museum's object record credits William Westlake with inventing the "loose globe lantern" in 1862. The earliest lantern patent this guide could confirm by number and read start to finish is dated 1870 — eight years later, and in Westlake's name alone, with no company attached to it at all.

For the mechanism Dietz's own lanterns still advertise, and the inventor who actually held that patent, see this blog's guide to Dietz's cold-blast lantern patent. A trademark needs a renewal filing every few years to survive; a patent needs nothing but time to expire on its own. Westlake's globe-holder mechanism was free for anyone to copy within two decades of his first filing — the name stamped into the metal is the one thing the company actually kept. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.