Friedrich August Stübgen was a master metalworker from Horsmar, a village near Mühlhausen in Thuringia. In 1843 he set up a lamp factory in Erfurt with six journeymen. Kerosene was not yet imported into Germany, so his lamps burned vegetable and mineral oil, and the workshop turned out household goods besides.

A year later the master metalworker Carl Anton Kleemann bought into the business and it became Lampenfabrik Stübgen & Kleemann. Kleemann left in 1851 to start his own factory in Erfurt with his son — C. A. Kleemann & Sohn — and Friedrich Stübgen went on alone as Lampenfabrik Fr. Stübgen & Co.

He took another partner in 1857: Klöpfel, who came from six years as works manager of the main machine shop of the Thuringian railway. He stayed until 1866 and founded E. Klöpfel & Sohn in Erfurt the following year. Erfurt's lamp trade grew, to a striking degree, out of men leaving this one workshop.

Friedrich August Stübgen died in 1877, aged 58. His eldest son Gustav, an engineer, took over.

The years that followed were hard. Kerosene was spreading across Europe and with it a crowd of new competitors, while wars in Europe and the Near East disrupted the export markets the firm depended on. In 1879 Gustav's brother Julius, a merchant, came in as a partner — the commercial half to Gustav's technical one.

The first patent known from the factory dates from 1882: DE19571, covering the mounting of the fuel reservoir on a lamp.

By 1885 the old premises were too small. The brothers bought land on Moltkestrasse, now Thälmannstrasse, and built a factory with warehousing, adding to it repeatedly until the last building work was finished in 1910.

In 1892 the factory registered its trademark: a bat, Fledermaus in German, wings spread. Others followed over the years — PAN, STUBS, BAT MINOR — but the bat was the one that stuck. It ended up doing what few trademarks manage: the word "bat lamp" came to mean the object rather than the maker, and in a good many countries it still does.

The firm celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in 1903, in the Kaisersaal in Erfurt. By 1910 it employed 400 people and sent more than seventy per cent of its output abroad — across Europe and above all to the northern countries, but also to Russia, Poland, the United Kingdom and its colonies, Japan and China.

The First World War took most of those markets away almost overnight.

In 1918 the third generation joined: Franz, Julius's son, in sales; and Gustav's two sons, Rudolf as the engineer over development and production, and Walther in management.

Alongside lanterns the factory had long made table lamps, wall lamps, ceiling lamps and other kerosene lamps. Demand for them fell away, and in 1922 the firm stopped making them altogether to concentrate on BAT hurricane lanterns. The name changed to match: Laternenfabrik Fr. Stübgen & Co — lantern factory, no longer lamp factory.

The lantern itself was improved continually. By 1924 the company held 23 valid German imperial patents (D.R.P.) for its lamps and lanterns alone, besides many registered designs (D.R.G.M.) and patents abroad. Recovering the pre-war trade was another matter: customs duties and tariffs stood between Erfurt and the former enemy states and their allies — Poland, Britain, North America, Japan — and the enormous Russian market was closed off by the politics of the new Soviet Union.

In 1927 the factory bought the patents and trademark rights to the Virgo brand from the Berlin firm Ed. Sommerfeld, customers included: the Virgo No. 335, a cold-blast lantern, and the Virgo No. 505, a mixed-air lantern.

It mattered more than a brand purchase usually does. Stübgen had never had a cold-blast lantern in the range, and every cold-blast model the factory built afterwards grew out of this one acquisition.

With the main export markets in poor shape, the company set up joint-venture factories in 1928 — one in Danzig serving Poland, one in Leningrad serving the Soviet Union — both making BAT hurricane lanterns. Danzig was then the Free City of Danzig, a self-governing city state under League of Nations protection; today it is Gdańsk in Poland.

From 1930 Erfurt also built lanterns for the American maker Dietz, who could buy them cheaply thanks to a favourable exchange rate against the dollar. The Dietz Little Wizard, the Dietz Junior and the Dietz AJAX were all made by Stübgen — and the AJAX is the same lantern as the PAN 697.

In 1931 HASAG, Hugo Schneider AG of Leipzig, bought the production equipment of Kaestner & Toebelmann, another Erfurt lantern maker, and carried on with a few models under the K&T brands Panzer and Colibri. It proved unprofitable. From 1935 HASAG gave up making them and bought its lanterns from Fr. Stübgen & Co instead — the same lanterns as the BAT, with the trademark changed to HASAG Panzer and HASAG Colibri.

This is why lanterns turn up carrying one firm's name and the other's construction, and why telling them apart takes a careful eye.

By the mid-1930s the machines in Erfurt were out of date and the work increasingly unprofitable, while state price controls and the cartels made new investment impossible. On 1 January 1937 Fr. Stübgen & Co sold all its brands except Bat, together with its patents, its customer records and what little of the plant was still worth having, to HASAG. HASAG built a new factory at Meuselwitz in Thuringia and registered the English trademark BAT in place of the German Fledermaus.

Erfurt became Fr. Stübgen & Co. Metallwerk and turned to other work: agricultural tools, among them a patented device for sharpening a scythe by hammering the blade, and the patented Fledermaus zigzag press and other sheet-metal machinery. The family kept the Fledermaus name and kept the bat, redrawn in a new form.

From 1940 the works was pulled into armaments: gas-mask filters, shell boxes, machine-gun components, parts for anti-aircraft guns. A second site was bought on Stotternheimer Strasse in Erfurt to serve as a proving range.

In 1945 and 1946, first under American occupation and then Soviet, the company was confiscated and expropriated. Its machines, tools and equipment were dismantled and shipped to the USSR. The Thuringian branch of the Volkssolidarität moved into the empty buildings and let part of the space to tradesmen for storage.

On 25 August 1948, after more than a hundred years, Fr. Stübgen & Co was struck from the commercial register.

Production continued in the Feuerhand works, new models following Feuerhand drawings. HASAG itself disappeared, and the BAT trademark passed in time to MEWA. From 1952 BAT hurricane lanterns were made by VEB Sturmlaternenwerk Beierfeld, a MEWA works. In the 1980s the Sturmlaternenwerk was absorbed into Foron, which kept lantern production going only briefly before ending it for good.

The historical research on this page was compiled by Achim Stübgen, who worked through a great many archive sources to reconstruct the story. My thanks to him for permission to publish it here along with his images.

All text and images relating to Fr. Stübgen & Co are protected by copyright.

Copyright © Achim Stübgen, Hannover 2015