AN EXPENSIVE PRODUCT

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 28, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 42.

AN EXPENSIVE PRODUCT.

WHAT is the most expensive product in the world?—It is charcoal thread, which is employed for incandescent lamps. It is, for the most part, manufactured at Paris, and comes from the hands of an artist who desires his name to remain unknown in order to better protect the secret of manufacture. It is by the gram (15¼ grains) that this product is sold at wholesale. In reducing its price to the basis of pounds, it is easily found that the filaments for lamps of twenty candles are worth $8,000 per pound, and that for lamps of thirty candles they are worth $12,000 per pound. The former have a diameter of twenty-thousandths of one millimeter (one millimeter equals 0.0394 inch), and the latter four and one-half thousandths of a millimeter. The filaments for lamps of three candles are so light that it would require nearly 1,500,000 of them to weigh a pound. As the length of each of them is ten centimeters (3.937 inches), their total length would be 187 miles.—Thrice-a-Week World.