Collector guides
Fakes and reproductions: what to check before you buy a miner’s lamp
The German mining-history group GAG runs untertage.com, and it has a long article on fake miners’ lamps. Here are the useful bits, translated and boiled down.
A caution first. The article was written in 2005, and the site now says fakes have become “far more complex and refined in detail”. These checks still help, but a good modern fake may get past them. The picture is a recreation of a frog lamp, not one of the lamps in the article.
What gets faked
- High-end safety lamps, copied “perfectly”: brass Pokorny, Pieler (Mährisch Ostrau) and the Friemann & Wolf “Stuchlik” carbide safety lamp (a real Stuchlik is worth a realistic €4,000–5,000). Copies of Davy and A-H-G lamps turn up too. Most are made in south-eastern Europe, usually in batches of ten or more.
- Carbide: mainly Friemann & Wolf brass cap lamps (the “Tönnchen” or little barrel lamps), sold at about a quarter of the price of an original. The newer trick is to buy a worthless carbide wreck just for its original plate and fit it to a fake.
- Frog lamps (open oil lamps) are by far the most faked type, from rusty copies sold by the pile for about €10 up to “perfect” Harz frogs at well over €1,000.
- Freiberg “Blenden” (brass candle shields on a wooden back) are now offered as reproductions in quantity.
Tell-tale signs on safety-lamp fakes
- The sheet metal is a bit thicker than on the original.
- Ageing chemical left behind: the lamp is dipped, then machine-brushed only where the brushes reach. Spots behind the pillars stay black, and that black can usually be rubbed off with a fingernail to show shiny brass.
- Very little real mechanical wear.
Checks on frog lamps
- Swivel and hook: the wear has to match the part it rubs against. Hang it up: if the wick spout points upwards, ask how the oil would ever reach the wick.
- The plate is hardest to fake. Watch for plates that are too thick or crude and unworn, bright or proud rivets (especially copper), struck letters that still have a raised edge, and dates struck later. A missing plate can knock about half off the value.
- Rust: genuine age gives a dark brown oxide skin. Chemically aged fakes get a granular, rust-red finish.
- Cheap brass copies often have no solder at all, with gaps between the parts, blue-green salt residue and unfiled burrs. Some even have a thin coat of verdigris, so don’t let green crud fool you.
- Fully polished or sandblasted frogs have next to no collector value.
- On Blenden, the wood is the first test: it should look like a worn, hundred-year-old church pew.
Buying online
- Never buy an expensive lamp from photos alone.
- Ask where it came from. “It was my grandad’s” doesn’t work for a frog lamp: no grandad is that old.
- Check that the wear makes sense, and get a second opinion. Post it in the Facebook group first if you like.
- Buy from reputable dealers and take your time.
- A reproduction isn’t always a fraud. Some are honest decorator pieces or retirement gifts. Selling one as genuine is the problem.
Credit. Summarised and translated from the article on untertage.com, with thanks to GAG. We haven’t reused their photos.
