For those that find that their item is not all original and would like to restore it properly, a sales section will be added to this site for those that need to purchase hard to find or rare electrical parts.

If you are a researcher, collector or just the everyday person looking for information, you will want to keep checking back. This site is only partly finished - As you see it now, it only contains a small percentage of the information that I have so far to put on line (which still grows almost daily).

If you are a researcher or webmaster, I plan on adding many more tools as they are completed (see below).

What You Can Find Here?

Tutorials - I plan on adding many different types of tutorials and tutorial type information.
Quick Tests for training: For example, showing different past ebay items or auctions and asking questions about them. This will be part of an interactive computer program that that will score you on your buying or selling knowledge as it teaches you. Other Tutorials: These will be in simple formats such as a Collecting Tutorial which will teach you the pros and cons of collecting, how to start collecting, why collect, what to collect, common mistakes in collecting, etc. More Advanced Tutorials: These will be awesome tools to teach you about shades, fixtures, sockets, electrical parts, etc. For example if you have a fixture that you need to learn about you will be able to track different fixture parts such as the canopy (in the canopy section) and see when they started making that style, the same goes for other parts of the fixture such as the sockets, shade holders, nozzles, check rings, finials, etc. A short list of completed tutorial type information is listed below:
The Lighting Time Table which now walks you through fixture styles (and other information from 1879-1900. (this will expand to 1900-1921 which is still being worked on).
The National Electrical Code (NEC) This section is everything you ever wanted to know about the National Electrical Code (NEC) but had no one to ask. Downloads of old NEC's, meetings and much extended information is provided.

Learning Tools And Research Material
I have many ideas and plans for different learning tools. I am multitasking a lot here trying to get as much done and online as I can in the shortest amount of time. This is one reason you will find many incomplete or unfinished areas. I always finish what I start, so please be patient with me as for the most part I am working alone on this site. While I do have some programming help, and those that provide a lot of good information such as one of my forum moderators - adam allerhand (without which a large portion of this site would not be possible), the putting together and implementation of everything is my work load.

Interactive Forums
User Forums - Post pictures of your items and ask questions or just learn from reading the posts from others
Some of the current forum areas are:

Introductions - Introduce Yourself: Post a simple message telling us a little about yourself.

Antique Sockets Q&A - Post pictures of your items and ask questions about them

Electrical Supplies - A place to post questions and pictures of different electrical supplies such as fuse blocks, fuses, rosettes, plugs, switches, etc.

Electrical Appliances - Post questions or pictures of different electrical items such as fans, electric motors, toasters, heaters, etc.

Fixtures & Fixture Parts - This forum area covers all fixture parts and lighting fixtures. This area covers items such as shade holders, cord adjusters, shades, canopies, nipples, lamps, sconces, etc..

Bulb Forum - Post pictures and questions about antique light bulbs

Items For Sale - A place to post your antique or vintage electrical items for sale.

Online Databases : Note these areas were lost in a crash and for now are brought into the forums, some of the old catalog uploads have been uploaded here:
http://antiquesockets.com/forum-pics/magazineads/
http://antiquesockets.com/forum-pics/cat-images/

Catalog Database
View pictures or track old items through antique and vintage catalogs
Ad Database
View or upload ads from antique magazines

Research Material

Bulb & Socket Bases
View images of the most well known bulb and socket base
Socket Dating Methods
Socket dating methods (more to come) but for now listed as Switch Material, Electrical Code, Mica Insulation, CP or WATTS Marks, Socket Bead/Rib/UNO, Catalogs & Ads, Patents and Pull Chains / Finials

Socket & Electrical Manufacturer's Items And Their History
Hubbell
This is where this web site started from. Since this page was done, there has been much more Hubbell history and information found which will make for a complete redesign of this page and section in the soon future.
Other Manufacturers
This section is a lot of incomplete work and will be updated shortly. For now it serves to give you some extended, information on some companies, but will be a much better tool when it is complete.
You can also find some history of early manufacturers in the lighting timetable for Edison, Edison-Bergmann, The U.S. Elect. Co., The Brush Elect. Co., Thomson-Houston and Westinghouse.

Identify PRE-1900 Sockets
This Identify section has photographs of early sockets and information on how to identify some of the major manufacturers of pre 1900 sockets. Socket manufacturers included so far include Bergmann & Co., Brush Electric Co. , Bryant Electric Co., Crown Elect MFG Co., EE&S, Holmes & Gale (HG), Perkins, Thomson-Houston and
Westinghouse.

Patent Information And Patent Tools
There have been some recent patent utilities coming to life on the web. When I first started researching patents, there were not as many patent resources. I started by downloading only Hubbell patents and added them to this Hubbell patent research section. Later I added a small patent help section to the top of the page as a quick help guide when using the United States patent office database. Later I started another project (still working on) in which I sorted many socket patents that I had found by owners, and started adding them to a section on the web page that I call the "Others" page (meaning other manufacturers). I then started experimenting with different types of searches and finding many different patents for items using class and subclass id searches. This made it easier to find for example most shade holder patents by only searching a few individual classes. Then one day a big surprise, Google put the entire patent database online for searching. Google used some image recognition software to convert the patents from images into plain text. While this is a GREAT new utility and search engine, it is lacking in that many names, titles, inventors and other items had errors during the conversion process. This caused misspellings and serious problems in locating some patents.

Our Patent Utilities

Patent Linker - Patent linker is a simple command that can be typed at the top of your browser in the location bar, or used on your web page as a link. It is a simple and straight forward link to our database that exits gracefully. To use it from your browser's location bar Simply type (WITH-OUT the www) http://patentlink.antiquesockets.com/?PatentNumberHere and hit enter. In other words if you were looking up, or linking patent number 640492 to your web page, you would use the link as shown below:
http://patentlink.antiquesockets.com/?640492 (click on the back button on your browser to return to this page).

Advantages with using our pdf linker, would be that the images are not cut or down sized. The quality is there in the image for viewing and printing.

Also, Adobe has an option for fast web viewing. Fast web view will allow someone to view any part of the file while it is still downloading. This is great for large files or those on slower connections trying to view the file. If you download or link to a Google pdf patent file, fast web view is turned off. With our pdf linker, we have this option TURNED ON inside of the pdf which makes it view faster on your web page.

To check a pdf file to see if fast web view is turned on or off, you can download the pdf file; right click on it and select properties - then click on the pdf tab. Shown on your right is a pdf that was downloaded form Google patents showing the pdf properties and the Fast Web View turned off.

To display a patent PDF now Click Here and then type in the patent number or use the link above in your browser along with your patent number.

Group Patent Download Database - Download only patent first pages for an entire day.
Sometimes you only have a patent date. Normally to search a day, there is from 700 to 1000 patents per day at the patent office depending on the year. To locate your patent, you would need to search through the entire day. You can try google or another search first, but to search looking at the patent picture and then going back and choosing the next in the list can take several steps and clicks of the mouse button. In my past experience this can it can take up to a few hours to find a patent using this method. This is the reason for these archives. What use to take me a few hours, now only takes me about 10 or 15 minutes.

How it Works: - I have downloaded from the patent office ONLY the first page (the page with the patent title and picture) for every day that the patent office was open from 1870 until 1930. When you enter this page you get a simple date field. You can enter (for example) just the year 1895 and click on the submit button. You will get a page back with all of the patent dates for 1895. Simply find your date in the list and save the archive to your computer. You can also type in the year and month; or the year, month and day, but in most cases the year or year and month would be just fine. Now that you have the file on your local computer, you can use your image view program to simply click next, and next, etc. until you find your patent. There is no waiting for the web, or patent office database, just simple image views like you were looking at pictures in a directory on your computer. I use a third party viewer called VuePrint which allows me to simply hit my space bar to view the next image or the backspace key on my keyboard to go back to the last image. It also lets me stretch the image across two monitors as I use a multiple monitor system with 3 21inch and 4 different 22 inch screens. I just stretch it up and down over two monitors (click here to see what i am talking about) and the view is great as I hit my space bar from one picture to the next. In most cases I can find the patent in only a few minutes depending on if I see something else interesting and stop for a minute to look at it. After you download the archive to your desktop, open it and then copy the folder to your desktop or another folder. Now open the folder and open the first image. Now you can just click next, next, and next until you find your patent. Once you find your patent, you can now use the patent number to open or download the full patent using an online utility.

You can use this download utility now by entering the Group Patent Database

Patent Multiview Search Utility
This utility is still under construction as it is still compiling. We expect it to take another month before it is ready.
This utility will allow you to search patents by date range, single date, patent number, patent title (up to three title wild cards), Inventor, assignee, issue date, class or sub class id. It has different options of match exact, match all, match one, search extra. When you use the search option, for example lets say that you are looking for shade holders. A common class id for shade holders is 362/434, but you do not know that yet. Just type in "shade holder" in the title search. The database will bring back a list of holders from 1870 to 1930. Find the type of holders that you are looking for. Next to each result will be the patent number, date, inventor, title, class id, inventor and assignee. Now you can see that the type of holders that you are looking for are maybe found in two different classes 362/434 and 362/437. While you can still do different types of searches. If you search by class ids, you will only come back with the types of items that you are looking for. This is a good way to research seeing that many times you do not know the name of the company or inventor that made the item that you are looking for.

There are some advantages with using our search utility over or at least along with others.
Firstly with the Google search utility, it has many mistakes in spelling in both titles, inventor, assignee, etc. So if you are searching there you can miss many patents. With our search always be sure to put a check in the search extra box. This will search some extended information that we have cataloged from other plain text extractions. Nine times out of ten, if the title, inventor or assignee area had errors, our extended info had this information included, but without the same error. So this makes for a more reliable search when using this option.

Multiview Results - When you click on one of your results, you will see the basic patent information such as the title, patent number, date, Inventor, assignee, issued date, filed date, class id's, etc. BUT you will also have options and links to do one or more of the following: Go directly to the link in Google for the patent; Go directly to the U.S. Patent office to view the tiff image files for the patent; View the PDF patent file on our server; or to view the plain text file for the patent on our server.

You can test drive The Multiview Patent Search Utility now, but we are still compiling the data and it is not yet complete. I will add a notice to this page and the search page when we are finished working on it.