The Aladdin lamp: a federal court split the name in two, and the split never healed

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

The word ALADDIN was filed as a US trademark on November 13, 1908, for kerosene mantle burners, over a year before the company that owned it had sold a single lamp. A federal appeals court split that name in half in 1935. Another federal appeals court ruled on a single extra letter in 1977. And the two businesses that grew out of the same 1908 company, one making lamps and one making lunchboxes, are now owned by two corporations that have nothing to do with each other. None of that dates the lamp on the shelf. Two patented burner fittings, twenty years apart, do that instead.

What an Aladdin lamp actually is

An Aladdin lamp burns kerosene through a circular wick, up into an inverted mesh mantle that glows white-hot instead of producing a yellow flame. A round wick lamp like the contemporary Rayo, manufactured by Bradley & Hubbard for Standard Oil to sell more kerosene, throws yellow light off an open flame. The mantle design used a fraction of the fuel for several times the light — period sources describe roughly 60 watts of output from a lamp burning half the kerosene a flat-wick lamp needed for far less light, which is the entire reason the Aladdin displaced lamps like the Rayo in rural households still without electric service into the 1930s.

Victor Samuel Johnson, a Nebraska-born bookkeeper and soap salesman, encountered a German-made mantle lamp called the Practicus and founded the Western Lighting Company in Minneapolis in 1907 to import and improve on it. He moved the operation to Chicago and incorporated the Mantle Lamp Company of America on February 27, 1908, naming the lamp for the story he'd read as a child by lamplight. The underlying technology, an inverted incandescent mantle burning vaporized liquid fuel, was not Johnson's invention; competing burner patents from the same few years, filed by other inventors entirely, describe the same basic mechanism. What Johnson's company patented, starting in 1910, were specific improvements to how the mantle attached and how long it lasted — the parts that actually date a lamp today.

The trademark filed before the first lamp

The Mantle Lamp Company of America filed ALADDIN as a US trademark on November 13, 1908 (serial 71038624), covering "kerosene and alcohol mantle-burners and mantles and mica chimneys for use thereon." The company's own history places its first American-made lamp on sale in 1909. The filing came first, by a year: Johnson claimed the name in writing before the product that made it famous existed on a shelf.

That gap matters later, because a court eventually had to decide what a word filed for one specific product — kerosene mantle burners — actually protected once other companies wanted to sell other kinds of lamps under the same name.

How a federal court split the name in two

By the 1930s, two separate companies were both selling lamps as "Aladdin." The Mantle Lamp Company of America, renamed Aladdin Industries in 1926, had built its business on kerosene. Aladdin Manufacturing Company, an unrelated Indiana corporation, had been selling portable electric lamps under the same name since 1920. Aladdin Industries began making its own electric lamps around 1931 and started branding them Aladdin in 1932; the record shows the Indiana company had actually known about the earlier overlap since 1926 and did nothing about it for seven years.

The 7th Circuit decided the case in 1935 (Aladdin Manufacturing Co. v. Mantle Lamp Co. of America, 78 F.2d 426) by drawing a line neither company had asked for. Because "Aladdin" is not an invented or fanciful word, the court held that Aladdin Industries' decades of use on kerosene lamps gave it no automatic claim over an unrelated product category. Kerosene mantle lamps and portable electric lamps were "different descriptions and classes" of goods that didn't compete for the same sale, and Aladdin Manufacturing's seven years of silent acquiescence after learning of the conflict counted against it too. The court split the injunction cleanly: Aladdin Industries was barred from selling electric lamps under the Aladdin name, and Aladdin Manufacturing was barred from selling kerosene lamps under it. Neither side owed the other damages. The same word, one court ruling, two separate and mutually exclusive licenses to use it.

The extra L that still counted as infringement

The name went to court again in 1977, over one letter. A Florida corporation, Alladin Lamp & Shade Corp., had been selling lamp shades and fixtures under that spelling since 1971. Aladdin Industries sued, and the district court initially found no infringement, reasoning the two companies sold different products through different channels. The 5th Circuit reversed (Aladdin Industries, Inc. v. Alladin Lamp & Shade Corp., 556 F.2d 1263), finding the lower court had weighed the evidence wrong: the two names are pronounced identically, both companies used lamp imagery in their advertising, and a shopper hearing the name spoken would have no way to tell the two apart. A single added consonant, invisible to the ear, was not enough to escape the 1908 filing.

Lamps and lunchboxes, split for good

The name split a third way without anyone suing over it. In 1919, the same Chicago company launched a side business making insulated jars under the name Aladdin Thermalware — the ancestor of the vacuum-bottle and lunchbox line most Americans now associate with the word Aladdin. That subsidiary's name, Aladdin Industries, became the whole company's name in 1926. The same two words describe both a kerosene lamp maker and, decades later, a lunchbox brand for a single reason: they were never two different naming choices, just one name used first for a side venture and then for everything.

The two businesses have since gone their separate ways entirely. The kerosene lamp side is today Hattersley Aladdin Ltd, a British company that supplied wicks to Aladdin Industries starting in 1967, became a shareholder in 1973, and bought the sales and marketing operation outright in 2007. The drinkware and lunchbox side is owned by Pacific Market International, an American company with no connection to Hattersley. A lamp stamped Aladdin and a thermos stamped Aladdin both carry a name that traces back to the same 1908 Chicago filing, made by two companies today that have nothing to do with each other and never fought a single lawsuit to get there.

How to date one: the burner tells the story

The model number is stamped on the wick-raising knob at the base of the burner, and it is the starting point for dating any lamp — collectors track the line from Model 1 in 1908 through Model 23, still in production. But the number alone is only as good as the reference chart it's checked against, and this guide could not independently verify a complete year-by-year model chart from a primary source. Two patented mechanisms, both assigned directly to the lamp company and dated by their own federal filings, are a harder instrument.

The Kone Kap, patented by Charles H. Smith and assigned to the Mantle Lamp Company of America (US 988,902, filed July 8, 1910, granted April 4, 1911), fused the burner's cone and the mantle's cap into one replaceable piece. Before it, a warped or damaged cone could ruin mantle after mantle without an owner ever knowing why; after it, a fresh, correctly adjusted cone arrived with every new mantle. Two decades later, Lox-On (James Seldon Baker and Herbert Frederick Cunnington, US 1,909,515, filed 1931, granted May 16, 1933) replaced that fused piece with a separate flange that locks onto the burner with a quarter turn and stays there permanently — only the mantle itself gets replaced from that point on. A lamp built around either fitting carries a burner design that cannot predate its own patent filing.

How to tell a real one: glass, and a Geiger counter

Material tracks era almost as reliably as the burner does. Early lamps, from 1908 into the 1920s, are brass or nickel-plated brass. The 1930s and 1940s introduced colored art glass: ruby, cobalt blue, the milky-white Alacite, and moonstone, in named models like the tall and short Lincoln Drape, the Corinthian and the Washington Drape. A colored-glass lamp on a Kone Kap burner and a colored-glass lamp on a Lox-On burner are not the same age even in the same color family, because the burner generation and the glass era were not introduced on the same schedule.

One more test needs no reference chart at all. Vintage mesh mantles of this general kind, Aladdin's included, were commonly dipped in a thorium nitrate solution — roughly a quarter gram of thorium per mantle by widely cited measurements — because thoriated mesh glows brighter and lasts longer than untreated fabric. A period mantle will register on a Geiger counter; a modern replacement built to a non-radioactive formula will not. This guide could not confirm the exact year Aladdin's own production switched away from thorium the way that date is documented for Coleman, which made the same switch around 1990 — a gap named rather than guessed at — but the underlying chemistry is well documented, and a listing offering an "original thorium formula" mantle as a distinct, labeled option from a modern default is itself evidence that the two now sit side by side in the current market.

The look-alikes: a different company, same word

The most convincing "fake" Aladdin is not a fake at all. An old electric table lamp stamped ALADDIN is, per the 1935 injunction described above, a genuine trademark use — just from Aladdin Mfg. Co. of Indiana, a company with no relationship to the kerosene lamp maker beyond having fought it in federal court. A shopper who assumes every lamp bearing the name comes from the famous kerosene company is making exactly the mistake the 1935 ruling exists to prevent.

Other mantle-lamp era lighting is easier to separate out. The contemporary Rayo, made by Bradley & Hubbard for Standard Oil as a way to sell more of its kerosene, is a flat, round-wick lamp with an open flame rather than an inverted mantle, and collectors today retrofit Aladdin mantle burners onto old Rayo fonts specifically because the two were never the same technology to begin with. A round wick and an open flame rule out an Aladdin mantle burner before the model number is even checked.

What they sell for

Two realized prices, both from Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates, a glass and lighting specialist auction house, anchor the high end: a moonstone Model B-70 Solitaire, described as undamaged, brought $1,083.75 including buyer's premium on March 23, 2023, and a Rose Moonstone Model 103 Florentine vase lamp, virtually undamaged, brought $1,625 on January 18, 2024. Against that, a common clear-glass 1940s Washington Drape with a working Model B burner sells for as little as $60–70 by a specialist collector-market estimate, a figure the same source attributes mostly to the burner's own parts value rather than the lamp as a whole. New production lamps, built today with a modern MAXbrite burner, retail for $150–300. Color and model rarity, not the burner generation identified above, is what separates a $70 lamp from a $1,625 one.

Where the records disagree

Founding dates blur across sources depending on which milestone a given account is actually counting. Johnson founded the Western Lighting Company in Minneapolis in 1907; he incorporated the Mantle Lamp Company of America in Chicago on February 27, 1908; the ALADDIN trademark was filed that November; and the first American-made lamp went on sale in 1909. A source that says the company was "founded in 1908" and one that says "the lamp dates to 1907" can both be defensible, depending on which of those four events it means.

The company's own marketing credits Johnson as the inventor of the mantle lamp itself. The patent record does not support that as literally true: the foundational inverted-mantle, vaporized-fuel burner mechanism appears in patents filed by other inventors entirely in the same 1909–1910 window, none of them assigned to Johnson or his company. What the Mantle Lamp Company of America verifiably patented, starting with the Kone Kap in 1910–11, were improvements to an existing category of technology, not the category's invention. This guide could not find a patent filed by Johnson himself for the core mechanism.

This guide also could not independently verify a complete year-by-year model-number dating chart from a primary source, despite that chart being the first thing most collector guides point to. The two patent dates given above are federal filings and stand on their own regardless of which model number they apply to.

The company's kerosene-lamp side traces some of its own history through Smithsonian-archived records this guide could not fully read, including a 1919 dispute with the Daylite Company catalogued only as "patent infringement" with no further detail available without a research-room visit. It's listed here as an open thread rather than a resolved fact.

For a lamp bought on the strength of its base rather than its burner, this shop's guide to the Emeralite banker's lamp covers the same patent-versus-trademark shape in a different lighting category, and the Anglepoise and Luxo guide covers a company's own history page contradicting its own dating page. For general dating advice across the Lighting drawer, or the rest of the Field Guides library, see the Field Guides index.