Shadows of a Forgotten World

I found a few vault lights in Tallinn made by а Russian company before the Russian Revolution. The inscription says : “ С.-Петербургское с текольно-промышленное акц . о-во” The St. Petersburg Glass Work Manufacturing Company (Санкт-Петербургское стекольно-промышленное акціонерное общество) existed between 1911 and 1918, but as St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914, it means that these can be dated from 1911-1914, making them 100 years old.

Mackenzie & Moncur Ltd, founded around 1850, manufactured and constructed hothouses in Scotland and part of England . They also specialized in the manufacture of pavement lights.  

In 1848, Hayward Brothers was established. Their main products were ironwork: ranges, stoves, coal plates, circular and spiral staircases, and ventilators. Shortly after 1857, they started to produce iron pavement lights glazed with rough cast glass. And in 1871 one of the brother’s patents, “Improvements in Pavement Lighting,” brought about a significant improvement to the product. “Before then, lighting basements had been problematic. Open gratings let in light, but were open to the weather as well, and hard to stand and walk on; slab glass in iron frames was better, but admitted only a small amount of useful light; triangular glasses had been tried, but were not well designed, and threw most of the incident light back out again. Edward's idea was to split the triangular light in half: now the rays of light entering the top were throw horizontally into the space below, lighting areas deep inside.” Ad from 1925  Images taken from Glassian

I have only come across one of these in Lviv. I had no idea what it was until I saw similar panels in Edinburgh and Tallinn and turned to the Internet for help. It turns out it is a vault light to illuminate the basement. I found a good description on the Glassian website : “Vault Lights, also known as Sidewalk Lights (or Pavement Lights in the UK ), are those old glass prisms set into sidewalks to let light into vaults and basements below. Prisms were used instead of flat glass to disperse the light, diffusing it over a large area; plain flat glass would simply form a bright spot on the floor below, not providing much useful general lighting.  “The idea originated in the 1840s as deck lights. They were used on ships to let light below-decks… The idea caught on; by the late 19th century they were common in the larger downtowns, especially New York . Their use declined as electric light became cheaper and better, and by the 1930s were on their way out. Now, th...

In Riga I found a manhole cover dating from 1901 . Upon researching it later, I realized it was made by the Swedish company called  Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag Sweden ’ s first telecom operating company (founded in 1883), Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolaget (Stockholm General Telephone Company) (SAT) installed and operated telephone equipment. The company had a long-term partnership with LM Ericsson & Co., finally merging with the company in 1918. image from History of Ericsson I was curious why a Swedish-made manhole cover would have been installed in Riga in 1901, as Latvia was then under Russian rule. But I read that at that time the company Ericsson had many contacts with Russia , and in the late 1800s was delivering telephone exchanges to Russia . The first telephone exchange was installed in Kyiv in 1893 and was followed by Kharkiv (1896), Rostov (1897), and Riga , Kazan and Tbilisi (1900).

In Tallinn , I found an old metal roller shutter with a Russian inscription. Estonia was part of the Russian Empire until 1917 and so the shutter dates to before the Russian Revolution. Тильманское Железоделательное Акц i онерное (анонимн.) Общество. Прушковъ. From an issue of the newspaper Сибирскій листокъ , dated April 10, 1905, there is an advertisement for Штори ( draperies) made by the company ,, Тильманское Желѣзодѣлательное Акц i онерное (анонимное) Общество ” въ Прушковъ , which means Tilman Ironworks Joint Stock Company in Pruszków . Pruszków is a town outside of Warsaw. This part of Poland was also under the Russian Empire at that time. Note: the Russian orthography used on the shutter and in the newspaper is from before the last major Reform in Russian spelling (1917), as can be seen with the use of the letters і ,  ѣ , ъ .