The candle lamp did not appear once and then fade. It came back four separate times before 1940, in a division of the period that follows Card.

The first period was the velocipede craze of the late 1860s, covered in full under the first bicycle lamps and lighting law. A design for a velocipede candle lantern was registered in Paris on 19 April 1869. Enough examples survive to suggest it sold reasonably well. The firm behind it was better known for wagon lanterns. A French patent of that year, number 85,346, hangs the lamp housing between two vertical coil springs, to damp the bobbing caused by rough roads. A second maker, Henri Masson, patented a similar arrangement the same year under number 86,283.

The name of that firm is not settled. Both standard works give Biémont et Cie. The advertisement of 6 May 1869 prints BRÉMONT ET CIE, at 30, rue du Colisée, and a firm normally spells its own name correctly in an advertisement it has paid for. This site follows the advertisement.

The second period began in the mid-1880s. Henry Miller of Birmingham was exporting candle-powered hub lamps to France and Germany from about 1884. From roughly 1886 both Miller and Peugeot were building candle lamps for the new safety bicycle. It was cheap to build. An existing oil lamp body took a candle tube where the oil reservoir would normally sit. By 1895 the revival was over. A flood of oil lamps, many of them American, came in on the cycling boom and pushed it aside.

A third period came around 1900. Oil lamps were messy, and acetylene still made people nervous. A candle was clean, and the way it worked was obvious.

The fourth period was mainly French. Candle lamps stayed in ordinary use there through the 1920s and 1930s.

Cycle candles were made of stearin, with a melting point above 50°C. A small coil spring pushed the candle up against a collar. As the stearin burned away the base moved up, and the flame stayed at the same height. Behind the flame sat a spherical mirror, and in front of it a lens.

What went wrong was mechanical. A heavy jolt could splash liquid stearin onto the wick and put the flame out. The rider then had to dismount and light it again.

Makers sold candles to fit their own lamps, and said so. In his price list of 1911 Hermann Riemann of Chemnitz-Gablenz noted against each of his candle lanterns that only his own candles, number 1175, were to be used in them.

A candle burning inside a sealed tube has nowhere to shed its molten wax. A hard mass builds up, and in the end it smothers the flame.

The Danish inventor O. F. Asp filed a patent in January 1897 that addressed this. He used specially hardened, purer candles. He also built a double tube with ventilation holes just below the flame, which drew cool air up through the cavity. His lamps were made in Copenhagen and sold across Europe through importing agents. The design was still available after the Second World War.

Relighting was half the problem. In December 1894 a British patent was taken out for a match holder, fixed to the bracket that carried the lamp rather than to the lamp body. It was a small metal box with a hinged lid and roughened edges to strike on. It took either loose matches or a whole box of safety matches, with the striking surfaces kept out of the rain. One version clipped on and could be removed again.

The reason given was that a rider whose lamp had gone out should not have to go through his pockets in the dark. Separately from this patent, some makers fitted a weatherproof compartment of the same kind to the lamp itself.

Some makers got round the candle altogether. In September 1906 the Dane Otto Andersen took out a French patent for a paraffin burner. He made it to the dimensions of the candles then in use, so that it dropped straight into an existing candle lantern.

It was a metal reservoir with a spring at the bottom, sitting where the candle spring sat, and you filled it through a screw opening in the top. A cotton wick ran down to the bottom of the reservoir. Above the wick, in the flared part of the wick tube, sat an asbestos plug, with a leather gasket underneath. Andersen gave four to five hours of light per filling on less than a centime of paraffin. That is his own figure out of the patent and not a measurement.

This one is worth knowing for identification. A metal insert in candle shape with a wick running through it, sitting in a candle lantern, is a patented product and not somebody's home repair.

In June 1910 Paul Chaussinand of Saint-Dizier in the Haute-Marne filed an American patent for a candle lamp with an adjustable heat regulator. His diagnosis matched Asp's. The heat of the lamp melts more of the candle than the flame can burn, and jolts throw the liquid about.

His answer was to keep that heat away from the candle. Cork and asbestos insulate it from the hot parts of the lamp, and an air space surrounds the candle tube. On top of the candle sits a perforated metal disc, with a heat-collecting crown above it on a rod. The whole assembly is raised and lowered on a rack and a milled knob. Closer to the candle means more melting, further away means less. Chaussinand gives cold weather as the reason for the crown: in cold weather the flame alone warms the disc too little.

A rotating perforated sleeve regulates the cooling air, and flaps in the body open further in warm weather. Under the candle he put two springs instead of one, with a cup between them to catch the drippings. The lower spring could then not seize.

The oil lantern ran alongside the candle for forty years. It is covered under bicycle oil lamps. The gas lamp that displaced both is under acetylene bicycle lamps, and the electric formats that followed under battery and dynamo bicycle lamps. For brackets, date stamps and glass colours, see identifying and dating an antique bicycle lamp.

Primary: British patent 24,930 of 1894; French patent 370,392 of 1906 (O. Andersen, paraffin burner for candle lanterns); American patent 997,751 of 1911 (P. Chaussinand, candle lamp with heat regulator); Herm. Riemann illustrated price list, Chemnitz-Gablenz, 1911; Le Vélocipède Illustré, no. 6, 6 May 1869.

Secondary: Peter W. Card, Early Cycle Lighting 1868–1948; Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing, Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History; Bernard Mahot, Les lanternes, phares et fanaux.