The gasoline lantern burner mechanism Coleman has sold for over a century was patented by a Memphis rival named William Irby. Coleman bought the business. The patent record never changed hands.
The short version
- The lantern's core mechanism — a pressurized fount feeding a heated generator that turns liquid fuel into burnable vapor — comes from US Patent 657,936, "Vapor Lamp," filed April 28, 1900 and granted that September to William H. Irby of Memphis, Tennessee. William Coffin Coleman is not named on it.
- Coleman sold Irby's lamp as a dealer, then bought the Memphis manufacturing business outright in 1903 and began building his own version in Wichita, Kansas, as the Coleman Arc Lamp. The portable, screened, flat-based Coleman Lantern most collectors picture didn't appear until 1914.
- The company's own name, stamped on the fount, dates a lantern on its own: Coleman Lamp Company (1913-1925), Coleman Lamp & Stove Company (1925-1934), Coleman Lamp and Stove Company (1934-1945), The Coleman Company Inc. (1945 to today).
- A second, numeric code on the fount narrows that further to a month in most cases — but the code's own format changed at least three times, so reading it wrong is easy without checking which era's rules apply.
- A gasoline lantern stamped J.C. Higgins and sold by Sears looks like a Coleman because it is built like one — but it was made by a genuine rival, American Gas Machine Co., not by Coleman under another name.
On this page
A Memphis rival filed the mechanism's patent
Every Coleman gasoline lantern works the same way: a sealed fount holds liquid fuel under air pressure, a generator tube heats a small amount of that fuel until it turns to vapor, and the vapor mixes with air at the burner to produce a flame hot enough to make a mantle glow white. That mechanism is not a Coleman invention. US Patent 657,936, titled simply "Vapor Lamp," was filed April 28, 1900 and granted September 18, 1900 to William H. Irby. The patent carries no corporate assignee at all — not Coleman, not any company Coleman controlled.
Irby and a partner built and sold the lamp in Memphis, Tennessee, under the name "The Efficient" pendant arc lamp, No. 6, through the firm of Irby & Gilliland. Surviving examples are stamped "PAT APL'D FOR," consistent with a lamp built and marked before the September 1900 grant date.
William Coffin Coleman was a traveling typewriter salesman working in Alabama when he came across a gasoline lamp like Irby's and switched his entire business to selling it. He began as a dealer, leasing lamps for a dollar a week and servicing them himself in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, rather than trying to sell the unfamiliar devices outright. The Hydro-Carbon Light Company, his own venture, was incorporated in 1900; he relocated it to Wichita, Kansas by 1902. In 1903 he bought the Memphis lamp business itself, redesigned the burner, and began building his own version under a new name, the Coleman Arc Lamp, stamped "Made by The Hydrocarbon Light Co., Wichita, Kan."
From arc lamp to camp lantern: the 1914 redesign
The Coleman Arc Lamp of 1903 was a fixture, not a lantern — a hanging or standing lamp meant for a single storefront or room, the same role Irby's original lamp had played in Memphis. The models that followed it through the 1910s were still built for indoor or stationary use: the Model R reading lamp (1909-1916, fewer than 20,000 units across its full seven-year run) and the Model A "Air-O-Lite" (1911, fewer than 25,000 units in a 13-month run, also sold rebadged by United Factories and under the Sunshine Safety name around 1912).
The Coleman Lantern most collectors picture today — portable, fitted with a bug screen and a flat base so it could sit on open ground — was introduced in 1914, more than a decade after Coleman started manufacturing. It was built to go outdoors with its owner rather than light a single fixed spot, which is the actual distinction between a Coleman "lamp" and a Coleman "lantern" in the company's own early model names. Coleman and secondary sources alike put total lantern sales since 1914 at more than 50 million units, though no single citable production count appears to back that figure — it is a widely repeated round number, not a documented tally.
How the company's own name dates a lantern
Every fount is stamped with the maker's name, and that name changed on a known schedule, which makes it a dating tool on its own, with no serial number or date code required:
The 1925 change to "& Stove Co." is not cosmetic. That is the year Coleman started building camp stoves alongside lamps and lanterns, so the name stamped on any Coleman light fixture after 1925 is also, incidentally, a record of when the company became the two-product business it still is today.
The second stamp: reading the date code
A separate numeric code, usually on the underside of the fount, narrows the company-name span down toward a specific month — but the code's own format changed at least three times, so the same two digits mean different things depending on the era already established by the name stamp:
- Before 1941: a single digit for the year, with no month shown.
- 1924-1947: two numbers, year on the left and month on the right (a lantern stamped 26 9 was made in September 1926).
- 1947-1953: a letter-and-number code, where the number is the year and the letter marks the half of the year — "A" for January through June, "B" for July through December.
- 1951 to today: two numbers again, but reversed from the older format — month on the left, year on the right (04/82 reads as April 1982).
Note the overlap: lanterns dated 1951 through 1953 can carry either the older letter-code format or the newer month/year format, depending on when in that window a given fount was stamped. Reading the company name first, then the date code, and checking that the two agree with each other is the safer habit than trusting either stamp alone.
The look-alikes: a Sears lantern that isn't a Coleman
A green steel twin-mantle lantern with a Coleman-style pump handle and a Pyrex globe is not automatically a Coleman. Sears sold gasoline lanterns under its J.C. Higgins house brand — models 710.74000, 710.74001 and 710.74011 among them — that are frequently mistaken for Coleman products because they share the same general silhouette and mechanism. They were not built by Coleman. American Gas Machine Co. (AGM), based in Albert Lea, Minnesota, manufactured them, selling closely comparable lanterns under its own name as the RL-2 and RL-3, roughly matched to Coleman's 200 and 220 series.
AGM was a real competitor, not a Coleman subsidiary: the company became a division of Queen Stove Works in the mid-1950s, then the Queen Products Division of the King-Seeley Corporation, before its lantern line was eventually folded into King-Seeley Thermos Co. The practical test is the same one that settles every stamp question in this guide — read the name on the fount. A lantern stamped J.C. Higgins, Western Field or another store brand name was never a Coleman, whatever its pump handle or valve layout looks like.
Looking for an early Coleman lamp, a dated lantern for a specific year, or a J.C. Higgins to compare against one?
Search Coleman lanterns Search Coleman Model 242 Search J.C. Higgins lanterns
Where the records disagree
Company histories, repeated across encyclopedia entries and trade write-ups, describe Coleman as having "acquired the patent" for Irby's lamp in 1903. The patent record itself does not support that specific claim. US 657,936, as granted and as it stands in the public patent record, lists only William H. Irby — no assignee, corporate or otherwise, was ever recorded against it. Whatever Coleman bought in 1903 — the Memphis manufacturing operation, its tooling, its customer base, its goodwill — was a private commercial transaction. It did not include a recorded transfer of the patent itself, at least not one that survives in the record this guide could check. "Acquired the patent" is common shorthand in company histories for a messier bundle of rights, and the gap between the phrase and the patent office's own record is worth naming rather than repeating as settled fact.
A smaller discrepancy: one company-history source names the specific town where Coleman first saw a gasoline lamp as Brockton, Alabama. Neither Coleman's own Wikipedia biography nor the Kansas Historical Society's account names a town at all, only the state. No place called Brockton, Alabama could be independently confirmed, so this guide repeats only what two sources agree on — Alabama, with no more specific location claimed.
What they sell for now
| What | Figure | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Common single-mantle lantern, 1960s-80s (e.g. a 1978 red 200A) | $74.99 | Asking price, eBay |
| Scarce nickel-finish single-mantle 242C, dated 12/1947, "Sunshine of the Night" marking | $425 or best offer | Asking price, eBay |
| Specialist lantern price-guide aggregate, 20 tracked Coleman lantern sales | $10 to $6,000; average $130.59 | Reported as sold, aggregator |
No confirmed hammer price from a named auction house — RR Auction or Hake's, the two this series checks first — could be found for any Coleman lantern. That absence is itself informative: Coleman lanterns were built by the tens of millions, and even the earliest fixture-era models numbered under 25,000 units each, which is scarce by production count but still ordinary enough that no major collectibles auction house appears to have carried one as a headline lot. The real rarity in this category sits with the pre-1914 lamps — the Model R and Model A — not with any twin-mantle camp lantern from the decades after.
For another dated-by-the-maker's-own-stamp lighting guide, see Owl and Twig's guide to the Dietz cold-blast railroad lantern, where a rival's patent carries the same weight a Coleman collector gives the fount stamp here. For another patent bought rather than invented, see the Guy's Dropper carbide lamp guide. See more Field Guides
Sources
- US Patent 657,936, "Vapor Lamp," William H. Irby, for the filing date, grant date, inventor, and the absence of a recorded assignee.
- William Coffin Coleman, Wikipedia, for his biography and the Alabama origin story.
- William Coffin Coleman, Kansas Historical Society, for his birth and death dates, the Alabama discovery, and the 1901 move to Wichita.
- History of The Coleman Company, Inc., FundingUniverse, for the Hydro-Carbon Light Company's 1900 incorporation, the 1903 purchase and redesign of the Efficient lamp, and the 1914 lantern introduction, including the unconfirmed Brockton, Alabama detail this guide does not repeat.
- Coleman US lamps: early models, Terry Marsh, for the Irby & Gilliland Efficient lamp's Memphis manufacture, the Coleman Arc Lamp markings, and Model R and Model A production figures.
- How to Date a Coleman Lamp, Lantern and Stove, Old Town Coleman, for the date-code formats and the company-name-stamp eras.
- AGM, King-Seeley and Thermos lanterns, Terry Marsh, for American Gas Machine Co.'s manufacture of the Sears J.C. Higgins lantern line and its own corporate history.
- Coleman lantern value guide, CollectionHero, for the aggregated sold-price range and average across tracked listings.
- Wikimedia Commons, for the Coleman 220F lantern photograph used as this guide's figure.
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