If you've ever wondered how American farmers lighted their homes before rural electrification, you could start by looking on ebay or Etsy, where you'll find advertisements for antique kerosene lamps from the early 1900s.

Before that, they used candles and whale oil lamps. Kerosene lamps caught on as whale oil prices rose in the 1870s due to over-hunting; there was no longer enough supply to meet demand. The new fuel wasn't as clean-burning as whale oil but it produced a bright flame.

Kerosene was first made in 1846 by an innovator named Abraham Gesner, whose method was to distill coal. Within a decade, it was discovered that the fuel could be refined from petroleum, which made it much more commercially viable.

Some people continued to call the new fuel “coal oil." Another name for it was paraffin, although, strictly speaking, paraffin is a more refined fuel that burns cleaner than kerosene.

The Aladdin Lamp was a popular kerosene burner in the 1920s and 1930s. Early on, it was sold door-to-door throughout the country, and the company's salesmen would let a farm family try out a lamp overnight. Eventually, Aladdin had more 15,000 franchises across the country, which meant they were sold at local hardware stores.

Lamps carried by Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, the big catalogue companies of that era, were Aladdin's chief competitors. “Monkey Wards," in its 1935-36 winter catalogue (the years the federal rural electrification program was launched), advertised a 90-candle-power lamp that was “nearly as white as sunlight—not yellow light like ordinary lamps." Ninety CP is slightly brighter than a modern 60-watt incandescent bulb.

A 1924 advertisement for Aladdin's popular Model 11 shows a family seated around a dining room table on which a lamp with a glass shade burns brightly. Father and son are talking on the left, Mother is on the right sewing, and daughter is on the far side of the table reading. She's wearing big bows in her hair, the latest fashion.

The caption below the illustration reads, “There's happiness in the home brightened by the Aladdin Mantle Lamp."

Model 11s were selling on eBay for around $150 when this article was written in November 2025. They sold for $11 in 1935.

What the Aladdin ad doesn't say is that the circle of light cast by even the best kerosene lamp was small, and lighting and maintaining it were tiresome chores. This is how these tasks were described in The Next Greatest Thing, the coffee-table book about rural electrification NRECA published in 1984:

“Lighting the kerosene lamp was a frustrating job. Keeping it lit was even more frustrating. It burned straight across for only a moment, and then would either flare up or die down to an inadequate level. Even when the wick was trimmed just right, a kerosene lamp provided only limited illumination. The approximately twenty-five watts of light provided by most such lamps was adequate for children doing their homework… but their parents, whose eyes were not so strong, had more difficulty."

Farmers shed tears of joy when this frustration came to an end and they could light a room with a flip of a switch. Some electric co-ops responded by ritualistically burying a kerosene lamp as part of their “lights-on" celebration.

One Pennsylvania system had a tombstone made with an epitaph that read, “Here lies a coal-oil lamp. Buried here May 3, 1941 by Adams Electric Cooperative as a symbol of the drudgery and toil which its member-families bore far longer than was necessary or right but which, with the energization of their own power system are now abolished for all time."