Continental and British makers generally used the parallel sprung bracket. Two arms work as a parallelogram and absorb the road shock. A rigid bracket with no spring mechanism is called a continental bracket. The bracket usually says more about origin and period than the lamp body does.

It was already the normal fitting by the middle of the 1890s. Two separate British specifications of 1896 call the sprung bracket the usual arrangement, and one of them says the same of side glasses. Those are two independent applicants in the same year, both mentioning it only in passing.

A rigid bracket is not by itself continental. The Neverout sold by Sears, Roebuck in 1897 had a rigid reversible bracket that would go on either side of the fork. That is an American lamp.

Brackets were also swapped, sometimes deliberately to make a lamp look older than it is.

From the summer of 1909 Lucas stamped the month and year of manufacture into the lower strap that holds the rear bracket arms. It was brought in so the repair department could see whether a lamp still qualified for servicing.

The stamp is three or four digits. 110 is January 1910, and 1025 is October 1925. A lamp with no stamp is either earlier than 1909 or has had its bracket replaced.

On earlier Lucas lamps, look for the initials T.B.L.W. of the Tom Bowling Lamp Works. Most Lucas output carries the Jos. Lucas mark. Part of it carries those four letters instead. A lamp marked T.B.L.W. is a Lucas.

Side glasses are normally red on one side and green on the other. The convention comes from shipping. A red light to port and a green light to starboard let another party see which way a vessel was heading. On a bicycle lamp they show the rider from the side. They throw no useful light on the road.

A lamp with clear side glasses may have been built for the Dutch market. A Dutch statute of around 1919 is reported to have prohibited red or green side glasses on bicycle lamps, after which lamps for the Netherlands were fitted with clear glass.

The Netherlands was a significant market. Stokvis & Zonen of Rotterdam acted as agents, C. Meulendijk distributed Salsbury candle lamps, and Rijwielfabriek Simplex of Amsterdam sold imported American models.

Almost every antique bicycle lamp that turns up is a front lamp showing white light. Rear lamps are much scarcer, and British riders organised against them before they were made compulsory.

A cyclists' touring organisation put out a booklet of objections around 1922. Avoiding a collision, it argued, is the business of the vehicle doing the overtaking and not of the one being overtaken. A rider who fits a rear lamp takes that duty on himself. There was a practical complaint as well. A small lamp on an unsprung frame would not stay alight, and riders objected to being prosecuted for something they could not control.

Rear lamps became compulsory in all English counties by 1928. Manufacturers stepped up production from the end of 1927. Most surviving British rear lamps therefore date from the late 1920s.

France was earlier and less strict. From 1 January 1923 a cyclist had to show a red rear light or a reflecting surface, so a reflector was enough. That difference of five years is useful when you are dating a continental rear lamp against a British one.

Both countries were behind some American states. In October 1915 Laurence Morse of Shelton, Connecticut applied for a patent on a combined front and rear lamp. His stated reason was that laws had been passed in certain states requiring a light both in front and behind. He put a red glass in the back of the lamp and threw light to it off a cut and bent tongue in the reflector. One bulb then served both directions.

There were earlier attempts in Britain. In the 1880s Salsbury moulded side glasses with a projecting ear, meant to throw a red glow rearwards. Dual-purpose lamps followed, starting with the Lucas Rubia of 1909, an acetylene lamp with a red glass in a housing on one side. Lamps of this kind went on the front fork instead of the handlebars. The red light then had a clear view behind the rider.

Manufacturers moved once legislation looked likely. In 1922 Helliwell of Birmingham launched the Helco, a dynamo with a rear lamp built into its aluminium casing. It was advertised as settling the rear light question: if the headlamp worked, the rear lamp worked too. That advertisement appeared in the same year as the cyclists' pamphlet against compulsory rear lights.

A lens low in the back of a lamp does not prove it was a rear light. In December 1896 John Moss of Blackburn patented a lamp with a second lens low in the back. A deflecting plate sat above it, and the cut-away back of the oil well was polished to work as a mirror. The light it threw was white, and it pointed downwards, at the pedals and the gear.

His stated reason was that a rider could then find the pedals when mounting in the dark. He could also oil the machine or adjust the gear without taking the lamp off its bracket. Work out where a rear opening points before calling it a rear lamp.

Moss gives his trade in the specification as manufacturer, of Johnston Street 103 in Blackburn. He was not in the lamp trade.

French lamps and fittings carry the letters S.G.D.G., for sans garantie du gouvernement, well into the twentieth century. They mean that a patent was registered. Nobody examined it. The mark is no evidence that the thing worked or that it was new.

British patents of this period come in two documents. A provisional specification is filed first, and a complete specification follows up to about a year later. The two can differ considerably in scope. The Moss patent above was applied for on 2 December 1896 with a two-line claim, and completed on 23 January 1897 with a much wider one. When you cite a British patent of these years, note which of the two you mean.

A patent dates an application and nothing else. It does not show that a lamp was manufactured or sold. For that you need a catalogue entry or an advertisement.

Dating points specific to each kind of lamp are on the fuel pages: candle lamps, oil lamps, acetylene lamps and battery and dynamo lamps. The law that made a light compulsory in the first place is covered under the first bicycle lamps and lighting law.

Primary: British patent 2,593 of 1896 (E.L. Williams); British patent 27,396 of 1896 (J. Moss, lamp with a rear lens); American patent 1,220,359 of 1917 (L.Z. Morse, combined front and rear lamp); French patent 370,392 of 1906 (O. Andersen); Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumers Guide, catalogue no. 104, spring 1897; Montgomery Ward catalogue, 1916; Herm. Riemann illustrated price list, Chemnitz-Gablenz, 1911; lamps in my own collection.

Secondary: Peter W. Card, Early Cycle Lighting 1868–1948, the main source for Lucas date stamps, bracket types and the Dutch side glass story, which he gives as hearsay; Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing, Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History; Bernard Mahot, Les lanternes, phares et fanaux; A.R.C.O.M.A., Éclairage : vélocipèdes et motocyclettes.