Imperial Glass Candlewick: The Patent Is for a Lamp Shade, Not the Bowl

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

Imperial Glass Corporation filed its first beaded-ball design patent for a lamp shade, in August 1936, the same month it introduced the glassware pattern that motif would make famous. It never patented the bowl collectors actually buy, and it never trademarked the name at all.

The first patent is for a lamp shade

Earl Newton saw a French "Cannonball" piece on a buying trip to New York in the mid-1930s — a pattern built around heavy glass balls around the base — and imagined a lighter, more delicate version. The edging on Colonial candle-wicking needlework gave the new pattern its name. Imperial Glass Corporation formally introduced No. 400 Candlewick at the Wheeling Centennial Celebration in August 1936, starting with roughly 40 items. By the 1950s it had grown past 200, outfitting a run that would eventually span more than 650 forms and sets, sold at Filene's, Gimbel's and Macy's and at five-and-dime counters at Kresge, McCrory and Woolworth.

The patent record tells a narrower story than the pattern's fame suggests. The earliest Candlewick-motif patent this guide could confirm by number and read in full is US Design Patent 104,222 — filed August 6, 1936 (Serial No. 64,278) by Earl W. Newton, of Chicago, Illinois, and assigned to Imperial Glass Corporation of Bellaire, Ohio. It issued April 20, 1937. Its title is "Design for a Lamp Shade or Similar Article," and its claim covers a bell-shaped reflector body with an aperture at its diametrical center and equally spaced spherical projections around its peripheral edge — a light fixture, not a bowl, goblet or plate.

Research by the National Depression Glass Association's own Daze newsletter — collectors who spent years cross-referencing Imperial's old price lists — describes a cluster of 1936 design patents assigned by Newton covering the four-toed bowl, matching plates and the 400/19 tumbler, plus later patents signed by Carl W. Gustkey (for the tall compote and twin candleholder) and by Carl J. Uhrmann, who joined Imperial in 1936 and eventually served as its president from 1957 to 1964. A January 1943 Imperial price list calls Candlewick "a patented design" and adds, "Applications are pending on others" — language the Daze researchers took, in 1985, as evidence that more Candlewick patents existed than they had been able to locate. They specifically flagged the pattern's beaded-stem stemware as a form they assumed was patented but could not find a number for.

This guide located a design patent that fits that gap. US Design Patent 171,671, "Goblet or Similar Article," was filed February 24, 1953 by Carl J. Uhrmann and assigned to Imperial Glass Corporation; it issued March 9, 1954. It is not labeled as Candlewick in the patent text — design patents rarely name the commercial pattern they belong to — but the filer, the assignee, the object and the timing (Candlewick's stemware offerings expanded through the 1950s, exactly when Uhrmann ran the plant) all line up with the missing stemware patent the 1985 researchers went looking for. That is this guide's own inference, not a claim made in any source consulted, and it should be read as a lead for a future researcher rather than a settled fact.

Imperial went bankrupt before Candlewick existed

Imperial Glass was founded in 1901 by Edward Muhleman, with production starting in 1904 out of a factory on Belmont Street in Bellaire, Ohio, once among the largest glass plants under one roof. In 1931, Imperial filed for bankruptcy protection; that July, a federal court ordered its remaining assets sold at auction. J. Ralph Boyd posted a $150,000 bond to secure them, and a new entity — Imperial Glass Corporation, the company that would file the lamp shade patent five years later — formed out of the wreckage, with Earl Newton as its first president. Candlewick is a product of the company's second life, not its first.

The company kept absorbing others on its way to its own end. It bought A.H. Heisey & Company's equipment and molds in 1958 and the assets of Cambridge Glass Company in 1960 — two of the glass industry's other storied Ohio Valley names, both of which also appear elsewhere on this blog, folded into a single company that would itself not survive the century. Lenox, Inc. bought Imperial in December 1972; Arthur Lorch bought it in May 1981; a labor strike hit in 1982, after which Robert Stahl bought the company. Imperial filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August 1984, this time for good, and its Belmont Street factory was demolished in 1995.

Candlewick was never a registered trademark

Imperial Glass Corporation's own federal trademark filings, searched through Justia's trademark database, list exactly four marks under that entity name: IMPERIAL AMERICAN HANDCRAFTED (Serial No. 72151756, filed August 23, 1962, for table, gift and art glassware), ETIQUETTE (Serial No. 72396992, filed July 12, 1971, for table glassware), IG (Serial No. 73006956, filed November 21, 1973, for small domestic glass tableware, stemware, barware and giftware) and TREASURED AMERICANA (Serial No. 73322062; the public record's filing date displays as invalid and could not be confirmed here). CANDLEWICK is not among them, and a broader word search of the word CANDLEWICK across all trademark classes turned up no glassware or tableware filing by any Imperial entity either. This guide did not exhaust all 500 results that broader search returned, so a filing under a different corporate name cannot be ruled out entirely — but none turned up.

The "IG" mark — a capital I superimposed on a G — is commonly described in company histories as introduced in 1951, "after patent approval." If that account is accurate, Imperial used the mark in commerce for more than two decades before its own 1973 federal filing — a gap in the same shape as several other trademark stories on this blog, where a name in daily use for years sat unregistered until a company finally filed the paperwork. Most Candlewick pieces carry no mark at all; the IG cipher, when present, generally appears on production made after the 1940s.

How to tell a real one

• Hold clear pieces up to the light. Older Imperial Candlewick crystal often shows a faint gray or blue cast that later production corrected — a subtle tell, but a real one, on pieces otherwise hard to date.
• Check the rim. Genuine Imperial pieces typically have a flat, ground rim rather than a fire-polished or rolled edge.
• Look for a mark, but do not expect one. Most authentic Candlewick is unmarked. A small "I" superimposed on a "G" places a piece after the 1940s; its absence proves nothing either way.
• Check the color first, before anything else. Imperial made Candlewick primarily in clear crystal, with limited colored and decorated runs. A pastel pink, blue, green, lilac or yellow piece in this pattern is very likely a late-20th-century reissue, not an Imperial original — see the next section.
• Look for a "B" inside a diamond. That mark belongs to Boyd's Crystal Art Glass of Cambridge, Ohio, which worked from only 18 of the Candlewick molds after Imperial's closure. A small line or letter added to the diamond roughly every five years narrows the production window further; three lines outside the diamond mark a piece to 1993 to 1998.

The look-alikes and the reissues

When Imperial Glass closed, its Candlewick molds did not go to one buyer or vanish into storage — they split, and each half had a different afterlife. By one account, more than 200 molds went to Mirror Images, a company run by O.J. and Margie Scherschligt out of Lansing, Michigan; 18 others went to Boyd's Crystal Art Glass in Cambridge, Ohio. Mirror Images put its molds to work almost immediately: in 1984, O.J. Scherschligt had the Viking Glass Company produce a few hundred Candlewick baskets in Viking's own Alexandrite color — a shade Imperial's Candlewick line never carried. From 1994 to 1996, Dalzell-Viking used the same Mirror Images molds to run an extensive Candlewick line in both crystal and color, including a pastel frosted series in pink, blue, green, lilac and yellow. In 2000, Mirror Images moved its remaining limited-edition Candlewick work — made for a company called Rosso Glass — to Mosser Glass, another Ohio glassmaker with its own roots in the Cambridge Glass Company.

None of those later makers are trying to pass their work off as 1930s-to-1980s Imperial production; collector references identify the Dalzell-Viking and Boyd pieces as reissues by name. The risk sits with a reseller or buyer years removed from that context, looking at an unmarked beaded bowl and assuming "old" means "Imperial." Color remains the fastest check: nothing in genuine Imperial Candlewick comes in the soft pastel palette Dalzell-Viking introduced in the mid-1990s.

Candlewick also has company outside its own family tree. Anchor Hocking's "Boopie" pattern uses a related beaded-ball motif on a different maker's glass entirely, and Czech pressed glass occasionally turns up with a similar look. None of these are Imperial Candlewick, whatever a listing title claims — the maker, not the motif, is what the beaded-ball look actually belongs to.

What Candlewick sells for

Realized sale prices for Candlewick are hard to come by outside a handful of forum threads and closed listings, so the figures below are asking prices unless noted otherwise — and the gap between common and hard-to-find Candlewick is wide.

Item	Figure	What it actually is
Imperial Candlewick clear creamer and open sugar, original label	$19.99 asking	Active eBay Buy It Now listing, checked October 2026; not a sale
Imperial Candlewick deviled egg platter, heart handle	$25.03 asking (marked down from $38.50)	An ended eBay listing; whether it actually sold at that price could not be confirmed from the listing alone
Hard-to-find forms: the 400/186 7" vase, the 400/68F fruit tray, the 400/131D 16" platter	No specific figure available	A price-guide reference describes these as still commanding high prices without stating a number; this guide could not independently verify a figure
Common forms: creamer-and-sugar sets, covered candy dishes, four-piece place settings	No specific figure available	The same reference describes collector interest in these as minimal since the 2008-2009 recession, with the secondary market described as saturated

The pattern spans more than 650 forms. A single "what's it worth" figure cannot cover that range: a common creamer and a rare 16-inch platter share a pattern name and a beaded edge and almost nothing else in collector demand.

Where the records disagree

Sources do not agree on when Imperial actually closed. The National Imperial Glass Collectors' Society's own history states the company filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in August 1984. A Worthpoint price-guide entry on the Candlewick pattern instead states that Candlewick production "ran until Imperial closed in 1982." This guide could not find a primary document — a court filing, a dated news report — to settle the two-year gap between those accounts, and presents both rather than picking one.

The company's own trademark history contains a smaller version of the same kind of gap this blog keeps finding elsewhere: the "IG" mark is described in company histories as introduced in 1951, yet Imperial's own federal filing for that mark is dated November 21, 1973 — twenty-two years later, if the 1951 date is accurate. Company anniversary pages are good for product chronology and poor for exact legal dates; the trademark record is the more reliable of the two for a date that would hold up in court, and the twenty-two-year gap between them stands as printed here, unresolved, rather than quietly dropped.

For another material that sat in commerce for decades before its maker filed any federal paperwork on the name, see the guide to Naugahyde. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.