Handel Lamps: Two Patents, and a Trademark the Company Never Filed

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 2, 2026

Philip J. Handel patented the glass-chipping process that gave his Meriden, Connecticut lamps their frosted "chipped ice" texture in 1904, and a shade-mounting ring in 1910 — the number stamped on a real shade's collar today belongs to the ring, not the glass. His company never registered "Handel" as a trademark while it existed. When the name finally reached the federal trademark register, in 1999, it was not filed by Handel's heirs. It was one of five historic Connecticut lamp-brand names a single unrelated company grabbed in a single afternoon, then let every one of them lapse.

Who Philip Handel was, and what he actually patented

Adolph Eydam and Philip J. Handel formed a partnership in Meriden, Connecticut in 1885. Handel bought out Eydam's stake around 1892–93 and ran the business under his own name afterward; it was formally incorporated as The Handel Company in 1903. By 1911 the factory employed roughly 125 workers, with Philip Handel as president and treasurer and a showroom at West Broadway and Murray Street in Manhattan handling national sales.

Two patents anchor the company's output, and both were issued to Philip J. Handel personally rather than to the corporation. The first, in 1904, covers the chipped-glass texture process described below. The second, in 1910, covers a mechanical ring for hanging a shade from a fixture, co-filed with a Meriden associate, Antone E. Teich, who assigned his share of the rights to Handel. Neither patent names The Handel Company as assignee — whatever protection the business had rested on one man's personal filings, not on a corporate patent portfolio.

Philip Handel died in 1914. His wife, Fannie, took over operations. The company stopped making lamps in 1936, twenty-two years later.

The number on a genuine shade collar is for the ring, not the glass

Handel and Teich filed their application on June 15, 1910; it was granted December 27, 1910 as U.S. Patent 979,664, titled simply "Shade-holder." The device is a ring with two flanges that grip a shade's upper edge and a centering shoulder that keeps the shade hanging true to the fixture even when the glass itself varies slightly in thickness — a mounting solution, not a decorative one.

That patent number is what collectors actually find stamped on documented, catalogued lamps. Auction-house lot descriptions for pieces sold by Rago and Toomey & Co. both record the shade's fitter or aperture impressed with "HANDEL LAMPS PAT'D. NO. 979664," alongside a separate four-digit pattern number painted or impressed on the shade's inner rim. It identifies the hardware that holds the shade in place. It says nothing about how the glass itself was made to look the way it does — that is a different patent entirely, and it appears on no catalogued shade collar found in this research.

The 1904 patent behind the company's signature texture

Six years before the shade-holder, Philip J. Handel filed U.S. Patent 775,818, "Method of Chipping Glass," on May 25, 1904; it was granted November 22, 1904. The process coats glass with a mineral paint, hardens it with heat, then applies an adhesive layer. Moderate heat afterward contracts the adhesive, which fractures into small pieces and pulls away both the paint film and a thin flake of the glass surface beneath it, leaving a frosty, crystalline texture. The patent frames the method as a cheaper alternative to sandblasting for ornamenting "glass and similar materials" — the specification never mentions lamp shades by name.

Collectors and the trade know the resulting texture as "chipped ice" glass, a name that appears nowhere in the patent itself. The company's leaded-glass lamp production began the same year the patent was granted, and a dedicated art-glass line, marketed as "Teroma," followed in 1906, according to a specialist collector history — a detail this guide could not independently confirm against a company catalog or a second primary source.

The Handel trademark did not exist until 1999

No federal trademark registration for "Handel" existed at any point while the company made lamps. The first one on record, Registration No. 2,691,332, was filed December 29, 1999 — sixty-three years after the factory stopped running and eighty-five years after Philip Handel's death. The filer was United Mercantile, LLC, based in West Hartford, Connecticut, roughly twenty miles from Meriden. Nothing in the registration record or in any source checked for this guide ties United Mercantile to Philip Handel's family, to a successor business, or to a license from either.

The application claimed first use in commerce on June 30, 2002, covering "lamps" and "lamp shades" in Class 11. It reached registration on February 25, 2003. It was cancelled October 3, 2009, after United Mercantile failed to file the Section 8 affidavit of continued use the law requires to keep a registration alive past its sixth year. For the fifty-one years Handel actually operated, 1885 to 1936, the only legal protection on any part of the business was the two personal patents above — never a trademark on the name itself.

One filer, five historic lamp names, the same week

The Handel filing was not an isolated event. USPTO records show United Mercantile, LLC filing four more trademark applications targeting historic American lighting brands: RAYO (serial 75882337), BRADLEY & HUBBARD MFG. CO. (serial 75882339), a later B&H filing (serial 78107810), and a second RAYO application (serial 78109875) in 2004. Rayo was a Standard Oil-era kerosene lamp brand with no documented connection to either Connecticut company. Bradley & Hubbard Manufacturing Company, by contrast, was Handel's near-neighbor in exactly the same city — founded in Meriden in 1852, thirty-three years before Handel, and sold to the Charles Parker Company in 1940, four years after Handel stopped operating. This shop's own guide to the Bradley & Hubbard trademark covers that registration in full.

The Bradley & Hubbard registration (No. 2,691,333) and the Handel registration (No. 2,691,332) were filed the same day, registered the same day — February 25, 2003 — claim the identical June 30, 2002 first-use date, and were cancelled on the identical date, October 3, 2009, for the identical reason. Two real Meriden lamp manufacturers, founded decades apart and closed years apart, ended up with trademark paperwork that matches down to the day. No source found for this guide explains what United Mercantile's business plan was, or why it let all five registrations lapse within a decade of filing them.

How to tell a real Handel lamp

• A genuine shade's fitter or aperture collar is typically impressed "HANDEL LAMPS PAT'D. NO. 979664," or simply "Handel." That number belongs to the 1910 mounting-ring patent, not to the glass-decoration process — its presence confirms the hardware, not the texture.
• A four-digit pattern number is usually painted or impressed on the shade's inner rim, often alongside a decorator's initials or signature. Documented names from catalogued auction lots include Gustave Leohner ("G.L."), Rowena Carter ("RC"), Henry Bedigie ("HB"), Arthur Cunette ("A.C."), and Joseph or Mary Palme ("PALME"). A specialist collector site, handellamps.com, maintains its own database of pattern numbers for lookup — this guide did not independently verify that database beyond the sample numbers it publishes.
• Documented table-lamp shades cluster at specific diameters — 14, 15, 15.5, 16, or 18 inches, per that same collector site, with boudoir shades at 7 or 10 inches. A shade well outside those sizes is worth a second look, though this guide found no company catalog confirming the full size range independently.
• Hand-painted reverse decoration shows individual brush strokes under magnification — a surface-quality check rather than a measurement.
• A base alone never authenticates a shade, and the reverse is equally true. Bases and shades were sold, and later re-sold, as separate parts; evaluate each independently rather than assuming a matched pair.

The look-alikes: Tiffany, Pairpoint, and plain unsigned glass

Handel competed directly with several other reverse-painted and leaded-glass shade makers selling through the same department-store and catalog channels in the 1900s through 1920s. Tiffany Studios is the best known of them, and the distinction between a genuine Tiffany lamp and a Tiffany-style piece gets its own full treatment in this shop's Tiffany lamp guide. Pairpoint, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, produced its own reverse-painted scenic and "puffy" shades using a different glass-forming method. Quezal Art Glass, in Brooklyn, leaned toward iridescent art glass rather than painted scenics, but sold into the same market.

This guide found no evidence of a forged-mark problem specific to Handel on the scale documented for Tiffany. The more common authentication issue is a mismatched pair — a period base reunited with a non-Handel shade, or the reverse — rather than a fabricated stamp. That is why the pattern-number and decorator-signature checks above matter more than the presence of any single impressed mark on its own.

What Handel lamps actually sell for

Two auction-house results were found for this guide, both from specialist Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau design sales. Rago sold a "Egyptian Ruins" chipped-ice table lamp, signed "Handel 6825 / John Bailey" on the shade and "Handel 1953" on the base, for $5,895 in October 2023 against a $3,000–4,500 estimate. Toomey & Co. sold a "Teroma" landscape table lamp, marked "Handel 6957" and the same 979,664 patent number, for $2,096 in October 2024 against a $1,500–2,000 estimate — a piece that had already sold once before, through the same house, in June 2021.

Beyond those two confirmed hammer prices, current dealer asking prices on 1stDibs for Handel table lamps span roughly $715 to $27,500, with an average around $3,000 across active listings — a wide spread this guide cannot resolve into a single figure without seeing the specific lamp's pattern, condition, and completeness. No realized-price data was reached behind the subscription databases (WorthPoint, LiveAuctioneers) from this research; treat any number from those sources, if encountered elsewhere, as unverified until confirmed against a public auction record.

Where the records disagree

Four disagreements turned up in this research, and none of them is resolved here on purpose.

First, who ran the company after Philip Handel's 1914 death. Wikipedia credits his wife, Fannie, with taking over operations and says nothing further. A specialist collector timeline (handellamps.com) adds that a cousin, William H. Handel, assumed control in 1919 — five years later — and that the company was not formally dissolved until 1941, five years after it stopped operating. Neither addition was found in Wikipedia or confirmed against a primary corporate record in this research; both are presented here as that collector site's account, not as independently verified fact.

Second, what the 1904 chipping patent was actually for. Its own text never mentions lamp shades, describing only a general method for ornamenting "glass and similar materials" as a cheaper substitute for sandblasting. Every secondary account checked for this guide ties the patent directly to Handel's shade production regardless. The gap between the patent's stated scope and its popular application stands unresolved.

Third, when the "Teroma" art-glass line began. A specialist collector history dates it to 1906; no company catalog or second source confirming that date was found in this research.

Fourth, why United Mercantile, LLC filed on five historic lamp-brand names in a single week in 1999 and let every one lapse by 2009. No source found for this guide explains the company's reasoning, and this guide does not guess at it.

For more Connecticut lighting history from this drawer, see this shop's guide to the Bradley & Hubbard trademark and its guide to Tiffany lamps versus Tiffany-style lamps. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.