You have to wonder who uses just 8 lights on their tree .
Charlie Brown.
anyone remember the REAL bubble lights that had methylene chloride in them???
I’d love to see what the safety warnings on that box would look like now adays - especially in California!!
LOVE the smoking jacket. And the Leg-o’-Mutton Sleeves.
Got any material left over, Annie?
Not about Christmas tree lights, but I remember glass globes full of red liquid in my father’s auto body shop. They were placed along the walls in holders so that the balls could be easily removed. Believe it or not, the glass balls were filled with carbon tetrachloride dyed red, and they were meant to be used for fire contol. If you had a fire, you were suppose to grab one of the glass balls and throw it at the fire. Come on, guys, what a dumb idea.
Oooh, oooh, oooh – I do. We only had two of them on the string. They were my favorites – used to watch them for hours until we got a television.
Click the pictures for more bubble light fun.
well, technically, if you were interested in putting out the fire, it would work. Just looked up carbon tet - and it doesn’t have a flashpoint. So it probably would smother a fire…
… of course, you’d get cancer in the process, especially if you breath in the fumes, or got it on your skin, but technically, it would put the fire out.
Wow! Is that what those were?
We had those on our tree when I was a kid.
I never saw them bubble though. They were probably REALLY old even then. It’s all one with the chocolate tasting of pine needles.
You never saw them bubble? Oh no! We didn’t have any but I remember seeing them in stores. The whole point was that they bubbled 
. At least I think so.
That is a lovely advertisement, Walden.
I tried to find a picture of those globe fire extinguishers Doug mentioned but I couldn’t—I had never heard of that idea. I suppose carbon tet worked well for electrical fires especially where you couldn’t use water, but missy is right. It is very hazardous. In addition to its own vapors being hazardous, it will react chemically in a fire and give off other very dangerous gasses. It was used in a lot of fire extinguishers, some of which might look similar to the ones we are accustomed to seeing. If you ever found one, you should turn it in to some agency that collects hazardous waste.
Phosgene comes to mind.
I thought Iwas the only one that loved bubble lights. I’d look at those lights for hours when I got home from school.
Yes, we had a string of them in the early sixties. They looked like the one in gonzo’s second picture. They slowly worked less and less each year (probably from being stored in an attic where they fried in summer and froze in winter as warned against in the wiki article). Eventually they got tossed. But they were way cool in their day.
djm
Any links out there that show them working in all of their glory?
Carbon tet story time!
I had a chemistry teacher in high school who told us this. He was some kind of industrial chemical inspector dude, and he went out to the local DuPont plant to do his thing. The guys working there would get their hands all dirty with this stuff that was hard to get off, so DuPont put out these big barrels of Carbon Tet for them to wash with. They’d go by, dip their arms in up to their elbows, and they’d come out squeaky clean. Great. He rectified the situation as quickly as he could, but this had been going on for a while. He told us how many people died from cancer directly related to exposure to carbon tet at that DuPont, but I can’t remember what it was.
Two possible answers:
1- With WAldco, that’s all you need.
or
2- Those who celebrate Christmukah.
Philo
Oh, snap! He’s got ya there!
“Instead of 1 day of presents, we have 8 crazy nights!”
–Adam Sandler
I just sold an old string of bubble lights on e-bay. My set only had 2 bubble lights and the rest were the old smaller bulbs. I was going to put them on the tree this year but I get so mad when one burns out and I have to try to find the bad one.
That was one of my favorite Christmas traditions as a child–watching my parents trying to untangle strings of lights and get them on the tree. Invariably, they would forget to test the lights and one would be burned out. It always ended in a rather amusing fight, with my Dad putting the lights up and my Mom retreating to the kitchen, muttering under her breath.