For the past few days I've been watching on eBay what I believe to be a very rare vintage fluorescent desk lamp. It's in the style of the manual preheat gooseneck desk lamps from companies such as Mobilite and Hamilton that we're all familiar with. However, this one takes a single F6T5 lamp. I bid on it last night, and won it this morning for the starting price.

I'm very excited to get it, and hope it arrives safe and sound. This lamp will essentially complete the core of my vintage lighting collection, as I will now have 4, 6, and 8 watt fixtures in both preheat and instant start form.

The lamp it comes with is quite interesting, as it is only marked "FL-6W". my first thought was it was a white lamp, but I'm thinking more likely that it means wattage rather than color, in which case it is undoubtly daylight, and therefore the original lamp.

I think I was the only one who even viewed the page. I'm not surprised because the guy did a pretty awful job titling the listing. If you searched "fluorescent desk lamp", you never would have found it (I tried). The only reason I found it was I searched "f6t5" to look at some lamps, and this was the first listing in the search results!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Westing-House-General-Electric-Flex-Neck-Desk-Lamp-F6-T5-CW-/390589235586?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5af0eec182

I had one very similar to this, and the plastic on the switch broke into a million pieces. It is really quite brittle now as it was made decades ago. GREAT find there !!

Ouch. Is the switch repairable in such an event? I suppose in a worst case scenario you could wire a starter between the button contacts, and then wire a switch into the cord to turn the lamp off.
Thanks!

I guess it could be, but I, like a dummy,  threw it away.  Just be very careful. A friend of mine has a lamp similar to this that has a 15 watt lamp and I warned him and it broke, but he glued the plastic part back and is very careful. 

made in japan back before they were of any quality?
lots of the cheap plastic from then will degrade and be more fragile than they were new.
a bit unusual to see a 6w in a desklamp though.
hopefully the seller knows how to pack!
sure cant take pictures worth a damm.

Indeed these desk lamps were cheap, but they seem to be half decent to me. Tons of them have survived to this they, including one I recently got and one my grandfather has. Yeah, the pictures suck. I don't know why he bothered posting the picture of the underside since you can't read a dag-gone thing on it. If you look at the listing, I asked a question regarding the length of the hood, just to make sure it really was 6 watt since I didn't trust the pictures lol.

My luck struck again! For over a year now I've been looking for one of those Osram Dulux Pocket lights, and recently someone put a mint-in-box Radio Shack branded one on eBay for $20 or best offer. I offered $9, and they accepted!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330919563493&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOIBSA:CA:3160

These lamps were popular in England too 60s 70s they still turn up in fleemarkets and car bootsales, often they would use a non standard size tube, they were I think the only type of preheating that we had no starters just press and light the cathodes let go it would light. I have even seen one with 2 120v ballasts wired in series for our 230V for US they only needed to use 1, they did buzz and the tube tended to flicker.