My wife and I purchased our first Aladdin lamp almost twenty-five years ago. We were living in a small town in Iowa where the winter storms could be fierce and often left us without electric power. It wasn't long before we went searching for an alternate source of light and heat for these occasions. We found our first Aladdin lamp in a small local antique shop. The lady that ran the shop happened to be quite an Aladdin admirer and was more than happy to demonstrate the lamp for us. The lamp was an alacite tall Lincoln drape and it was so different from the flat wick lamps we were used to seeing, that it didn't take much talking to get us to purchase it. It was love at first sight.
Shortly after purchasing that first lamp, my wife found a book titled "Aladdin, the Magic Name in Lamps" by J.W. Courter. It was full of information on Aladdin lamps and we were fascinated by the different colors and styles. We began to look in local antique shops to see if we could find any of the Aladdin lamps shown in the book. In short order we purchased a model 12 brass table lamp and an amber Corinthian to go with our alacite tall Lincoln drape. We also managed to squeeze in a vacation to Nashville,Tennessee where we visited Tom Teeter's "American Lamp" shop and purchased a new amber tall Lincoln drape complete with shade.
We used our Aladdin lamps many times to help light and heat our home in power outages. We began to look forward to being without electricity! We even loaned a pair of lamps to a farm couple that were without electricity for more than two weeks after a particularly bad winter blizzard.
As life would have it, we had to take time out from our collecting to pursue our careers and to raise two children. After a couple of moves, our lamps were relegated to boxes tucked away in a closet and stayed there for many long years. Finally, with children grown and more time on our hands we renewed our interest in the lamps and rescued them from the closet. We began to frequent local antique shops, then shops all over the state of Iowa, and finally expanded our search to neighboring states. Over the next couple years we spent hundreds of hours in our search and added over a hundred lamps to our collection. The search became a never ending quest and we loved every minute of it.
So that's our story and I hope this web page helps some of you enjoy the lamps as much as we do. I'll try to provide information that will be of benefit to you. I don't profess to be an expert on Aladdin lamps by any means-- but I will share what I have learned. I will also express my opinions and you may take them for what they're worth. They are expressed with the best of intentions and based on my own personal experience.
I would like to thank all those who have given us a helping hand in our search and hope in some tiny way I can help someone else in theirs. Good luck along the way and I hope someday we will meet in our journeys. Darrell