To the left is a really neat early 1960s mercury vapor street light that was designed so the light bulb would operate in "the open", thus no glassware required! To the right is a 1910s suspension-wire incandescent street light in active duty. This photograph was taken by me while the snow was coming down very hard with the wind whipping well over 50 mph at times. Joe got this neat suspension streetlight during 1982 when the Hingham Municipal Lighting Plant (MA) (where he worked) took the light down in 1982 as the utility converted to high pressure sodium street lights. This fixture was used along historic, well renowned Main Street in Hingham, MA in the "Glad Tidings Plain" section. Joe rescued the light from the top of the metal dumpster moments before the scrap man came to pull away the overloaded scrap metal heap. Joe was working for Mr. Thomas Halpin (general foreman) at that time and Joe has always been appreciative of Mr. Halpin's interest with Joe's collecting of utility artifacts. Nobody else there cared about saving "the old stuff" and Joe (as a relatively new employee) felt like the odd-man-out as he took home now-treasured utility memorabilia from the "trash". Joe's dumpster-diving relics really came in handy when HMLP needed photos of their bygone treasures (watthour meters, street lights, insulators, etc) when the utility needed historical documentation in 1994 for their centennial anniversary brochure and related widespread promotion. Joe was a major player with this and provided tons of historical reference to the town-owned utility that he was working for then. Please refer to: http://www.hmlp.com and click onto "history" on the home page (via the "About Us" tab on the top left) for the details that Joe provided describing this suburban (and very historic) Boston area community as the townspeople decided to implement their own lighting plant in 1894! Sorry for rambling on...but when you get to "showing" something really neat that you have learned a lot about, then it is only natural for me to spiel on about its wonderful heritage and background! Please note: there are photographs of these lights and of Joe's displays taken during the daytime during much more tranquil times shown within this album. Thanks for looking and for your interest! .....Tracey Beckham.