Greetings, my name is Michael, and I have been documenting and photographing Detroit's streetlights for years, however it is only recently that I have acquired 2 old GE arc lamps from the city, which were later electrified for incandescent bulbs. I have some questions about this light. The city of Detroit starting in as early as the 1930's and 40's began refitting the arc lamps to utilize incandescent bulbs. During this process they used many different replacement globes. When I restore the light, I would probably use a near teardrop globe from "Formed Plastics Inc". How would you attach a new globe to this light? I'm planning on media blasting the entire fixture including the copper/bronze stack portion, any opinions on how any of you would restore this light? The 2nd fixture which I acquired at auction is in the For Sale section because I'm only restoring one of these gems for my personal collection. Look forward to sharing lots of pictures, thanks for any responses, tips, and info.

Wow nice find!   . What's the diameter of bottom of the fixture?   I might have some clamps. Is the globe going to have a flange molded on it?

The light is at my friends house being cleaned, I will post diameter asap. I have seen both large globes fitted to these lights as well as smaller ones that don't take up the whole diameter. The formed plastics Inc globes do have a flange or lip and can be drilled into as they are polycarbonate.

nice to meet you. It would be interesting to see arc an arc fixutre lit in the future
but one thing about Austin texas, they still have a few Moon light towers around, but these been restored now it runs MV lights up on the towers. next time when i get a chance I would love to photograph it.

If you check the carbon arc lamp Facebook group; Mike Spadafora has three of these in near perfect condition with the only known complete set of internal parts in the world. More information can be found out about what they originally looked like (completely black) as well as operational theory.

Internal components for magnetite arc lamps.

I’d love to find one of those! Sadly most were converted to Incandescent.