Tim, I hope you don`t mind me posting this here but I felt it should be brought to the attention of bubble light collectors.
I spotted a set of the rare British Telsen style bubble lights on Ebay - they are an 8-light series wired 240v set by the "RLP Miniature Lamp Co" and are called Tubelights. The auction listing isn`t great and it`s in GB? too, so it might otherwise go unnoticed by regular searchers - I only spotted them by looking in the "other auctions" list (the same guy has a Pifco light set up). This is the only reason I`m posting this notice here - knowing how much I sought after a set of these, I`m sure other collectors would appreciate the heads-up.....?
These are very hard to find and although this one has 3 damaged tubes, the price is currently very low so someone might get a bargain.
Interestingly, and to steer things back more on-topic for this corner of the forums, I spotted modern repros of the Telsen/British bubble light tubes for sale at
http://simplylighting.com . Look for their Lava Bubble Lights. The bases are almost modern repros of Paramount`s later C7 offerings but the tubes have the unique mix of heavy, immiscible coloured liquid at the bottom of a tube of clear liquid. The effect is just about the same as the old and very rare Telsen lights, except of course these modern tubes have that slight "necked" portion at the top of the vial, not smooth all the way to the tip.
Spare bulb packs of 2 are sold seperately but seem to only have red in the tubes. The 7-lite C7 set has all four colours. They aren`t extremely cheap but if you`re desperate for a tube or 2 to refurbish an original set it`s probably worth the expense.
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