Coleman's Light: From Law School to a Hundred Million Campsites
Near Wichita, Kansas
William Coffin Coleman arrived in Wichita around nineteen hundred as a law student with no money and a plan to sell typewriters. He was not selling many typewriters. Then, while working a sales territory in Alabama, he saw something in a drugstore window: a lamp that burned gasoline under pressure instead of kerosene. The light it produced was cleaner and brighter than anything he had seen. He switched his sales line on the spot.
Sales were still disappointing. The lamps broke down often, and nobody trusted them. Coleman figured out why: the design was flawed. He acquired the patent, fixed the mechanism, and started manufacturing his own version in a small building in Wichita in nineteen oh two. He called the company the Hydro-Carbon Light Company, which was not a name anyone could love, but the product was good.
By nineteen oh five, Coleman's gasoline lamps were lighting one of the first night football games ever played in Kansas, at Fairmount College, the school that would become Wichita State University. Farmers began renting the lamps for field work. Towns with no electrical infrastructure suddenly had bright light. In nineteen fourteen, Coleman introduced a portable gasoline lantern designed to work in bad weather, a lantern that could be carried anywhere, that would not blow out in the wind.
When the United States entered the First World War, the government declared the Coleman lamp essential to the war effort and provided materials for production. Coleman made more than one million lamps for American farmers during the war years alone.
More than forty-five million Coleman lanterns have been sold worldwide since that first nineteen fourteen model. They have gone to Antarctic expeditions and forest fire camps, to family campgrounds and disaster relief zones. The smell of a Coleman lantern, that particular combination of hot metal and pressurized fuel, is the smell of outdoor America. It was invented in a small building in Wichita by a man who had been trying to sell typewriters.
