What I remember most about them is that they were extremely effective as unintentional bug zappers. The SMELL of instantly vaporized burnt moths in the room is something I'll likely never forget.
I had one of these! I want to say it was purchased in the late 90s and lasted until around 2006 before I finally threw it in the garbage lol! They definitely were not stable and once it fell over the bulb would usually break around 50% of the time... Also once it fell over or even if it just got moved a little bit all the parts that screwed together would get loose and the lamp would stand crooked and wobble until you tightened it all back up again!
I used to put my socks on these as a kid cause it'd warm them up. I ended up forgetting them one day and there was a fucking roaring fire coming out of the top of the bowl within minutes.
Girl I was dating in the mid 2000’s was sleeping with one of these lamps in her dorm room. One of those desks on the floor and bed up top bunkbed setups and her pillow fell onto the bulb needless to say the pillow got really nicely burnt. Luckly it didn’t catch fire
Older gen Z here, I remember these really strongly.
People always forget gen Z was alive for these kind of things and I'm starting to think nobody realizes how old we actually are. Most people you think of as gen Z are only really on the younger end of gen Z. Some of us are in our late 20s now and also struggling to understand kids these days.
They also made great pretend/play jousting lances, though all the insects that were dead inside of it would get all over the place as you swung those things around, but still, good times (at least until you got caught doing that).
And changing the bulb on one of those that newly burned out was like trying to work with lava.
I'm pretty sure the lamp my parents had in the late 90s/early 2000s was the one they moved into the house with in the late 70s, there was none of this fanciness in our house
I do not. I lived in a house that had ceiling lights and chandeliers in every room, so we didn't have any lamps other than a couple desk lamps.
I remember it being a PITFA to change the bulbs, though. Two of the chandeliers were in awful places. 1 was at the top of the central ceiling which was essentially 3 stories from the floor and the other was directly over the stairs, where you couldn't really position a ladder safely.