@Vintage , Welcome to CCS. In the interest of finding an answer to your question: "....can someone help and tell me what this is..." Pardon me for taking liberty with images you just posted. I'll tell you what it is... it's an interesting item you have shared with us . Thanks for posting it. I expect it's intended use is broader than for camping. I presume it holds a META solid fuel bar. I do not know definitively what it is, yet. It's a mystery to me: We can see German: DRP & **DRGM, British & US patents. A successful *patent search could be all the more interesting and "should" confirm what it is (*others are far better than I at that). **it pre-dates 1945. I can not make out 1st digit of British pat. no. btw. I can suggest as FYI: 1933 brochure (CCS subscription to view) lists a META "No.20 Candle" there is not an image of this item. <-- is an initial blind guess, that's what I see so far, said the blind man. thx omc PS and I think it's going on my wish list, thx again. edit: OOPS. in the meanwhile NOW your images are visible in your post. and fellow solver of mysteries @kerophile has weighed-in there with: "Storage case for Meta fuel tablets? Solid fuel hand warmer using Meta fuel? "
Solving mysteries is fun. @OMC guessed right, this is the Meta candle ("Kerze"). I haven't seen it pictured in any catalog, either. But here is a 1925 ad from the Swiss midwife journal ("Die Schweizer Hebamme", courtesy of e-periodica.ch): Apart from medical uses, the candle is also advertised for heating sealing wax. Best regards, Christina
Interesting usage für eine kleine solid fuel apparatus! I guess at that time it has been quite handy way to have & carry small flame producing device with oneself.
Bravo @night_owl to track down that illustration. ‘Candle’ brings to mind an orthodox wax/wick product but seeing those images makes the product description intelligible now. John
In case anyone else got interested in this strange META candle: Why does it warrant patenting at all? Isn't it merely a case for a solid fuel tablet? A patent search turned out quite interesting. Formally, the patents were not granted to Meta, but to Meta's parent company, Lonza (so a search for patents held by the Meta company doesn't help). Technically, the META candle is nontrivial in at least two regards. The reason is that the solid fuel, metaldehyde, depolymerizes when heated, to its monomer, acetaldehyde. The latter vaporizes at room temperature, already. Therefore, if a META tablet should burn candle-like, at its top end only, any casing must not get so hot that it causes the tablet to depolymerize and vaporize along its entire length. Also, after extinguishing, the tablet should not continue to depolymerize and vaporize just because the casing is still hot, which would waste remaining fuel. Furthermore, those vapors would be smelly and irritating. This was solved by having a liquid-cooled case. In one of the original pictures (cropped), ... a little screw is visible. Apparently, the screw covers an opening used to fill the case with liquid coolant. British patent 168868 mentions water or glycerine (not sure what was actually used in the META candle). The second peculiarity is that the burning top end of the META tablet should remain at the same position. Therefore, the tablet gets pushed upwards by a spring against some kind of stop. In a conventional wax candle lantern (like the modern UCO or Northern Lights ones), this is easily done by pressing a candle's top end against a neck that is slightly narrower than the candle's diameter. With a META tablet, that again would not work. As such a neck gets hot, the outer rim of the tablet would evaporate at the neck and burn faster than in the center, pushing an increasingly long, burning META finger out of the case. A second patent, therefore, was issued on retaining the tablet not by some kind of neck, but by a slim wire across its top end, again visible in the picture. The latter I only found explained in German patent 371042. Best regards, Christina
