Indeed. As an aside, why were SOX lamps always made with virtually standard BC caps..? The BY22d version used for the majority of LPS is marginally different, with the extra piece between the cap contacts (which is, I believe, to help with the prevention of high ignition voltage jumping between the terminals) but it's essentially a domestic lamp cap. The vast majority of discharge lamps other than SOX (with the historical exception of some of the lower wattage mercury lamps which used the 3-pin BC cap) use either E26/27 or E39/40 caps. Why don't SOX lamps use these..?

For the most part you would have to support it’s weight on the dome end so as to not pull the BC cap or its pins off!

Seller has one of these on Ebay for sale. They are huge!

Some were still in use in the 1990's but I am sure long gone by now.

Very nice! Shame we don't have many spanwire setups now.

Yeah, nowadays it the "latest and greatest" stuff that is everywhere. No more cool old lights.

Now, most of the "decorative" street lights are the same bland ones you see everywhere.

The government has gotten so PC that if a pole transformer leaks on the ground, a report must be made.

The ones i recall best from the 90s were with small "xmas light" incandescents (externally painted) with a sort of spikey ice crystal made of transparent plastic near the lamp base, which also forms the connector with which it plugs into the socket

I have in collection 5 Israeli FL fittings from the early 70's with what i am pretty sure are PCB capacitors. They are used as the PFC capacitors parallel to the line input, not as part of the ballasts

The capacitors are epoxy sealed and dont appear bulging or leaking, but there is some brown-ish residue in the fittings in the area near the capacitors - which means that they might have slowly laked tiny amounts of the stuff over the years. Perhaps in an US tar potted ballast the leakage would not get out of the ballast enclosure unless the ballast overheats and melts the tar out

Either way, the article does give me the same vibe as the panic that was here about asbestos as a building material. It have been used in many buildings as roofing material in the 60s, and in sheds and barns right up to the late 70s or maybe even after that. Anyway, in my town there is a primary school built in the early 60s where it was used as the outside wall siding. It had been painted over with perhaps 10 coats of paint over the years. Few years ago, in an "action to eliminate asbestos from schools", all that paneling had been cut out and removed with the use of angle grinders - Leaving more dust settled around on surfaces than ever throughout the school history, from where it really would be carried away over the next few months for everyone to inhale...