BulbCollector Forums
BULB DISCUSSION BOARDS => Christmas Lighting => Topic started by: glimmerglow on January 22, 2004, 01:14:00 pm
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I'm new to this group, and have a trivia question: when I was a growing up in the 1960's our family Christmas tree was always loaded with GE C-7 type bulbs. One color I thought particularly nice was a yellow, sort of between a lemon and banana color. This color disappeared from the scene sometime in the 70's, and I have wondered what caused this. Lack of popularity,problems with the dye, ??? The orange that it was replaced with was never as appealing to me. Since this group seems to know every bit of bulb minutiae, can someone answer this?
Thanks. It's a pleasure to be part of a group with the same interest(obsession) as mine.
Ed
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Hi Ed,
Sorry, when you posted your previous question I missed the fact that you were a new member - hello ! I too love lighting and everything connected with it - alas I do not have the space here in my small flat in the south-east of England to collect, but I really enjoy the wealth of knowledge and information on this excellent site. I'm afraid can not help you with your C7 question; I love these big Christmas lights and have often considered importing some from the US. We tend to have smaller, series-wired or (in more recent years) low voltage lighting. I am certain though that one of the readers of this site will have the answer for you !
Best regards,
Ross.
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I don`t know a great deal about vintage American holiday lighting, but suspect the dissapearence of the yellow bulbs was due to lack of popularity. Yellow-coloured low wattage bulbs tend to look very similar to opaque white low-wattage bulbs, because the inefficient tungsten filaments burn at a more yellow-orange colour than larger lamps. Perhaps consumers preferred multicolour sets with orange bulbs because that colour was much further away from the whites? It may also be because yellow is so much brighter than red, blue and green. Together with white bulbs, the other colours could be somewhat drowned out?
I have noticed that yellow lamps seem to be preferred in Canadian sets in place of the oranges, but could not tell you why. It could simply be a cultural difference. Perhaps Canadians in general don`t like white lamps in their multicolour sets, or if they did, just weren`t too bothered about the similarity between white and yellow?
British medium-bulb sets generally had white, yellow *and* orange, but went out of popularity in the 70s. We don`t have an equivalent of the C7 or C9 lights, our mains-voltage paralell wired lights use full-size 25 watt bulbs and are for outside only! So it`s just miniatures really, which usually have orange bulbs mixed in with the red, green, blue and pink, but no yellow and not usually whites either (unless it`s a Pifco set).
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