Posted 11 years ago
Rdm1221
(1 item)
The item says drink pilsner Fremont brewing company. Any information would awesome. Thank you. I think the brewery was in Nebraska.
Fremont brewing company bottle opener | ||
| Breweriana1659 of 2917 |  |  |
Fremont brewing company bottle opener | ||
| Breweriana1659 of 2917 | | |
Posted 11 years ago
Rdm1221
(1 item)
The item says drink pilsner Fremont brewing company. Any information would awesome. Thank you. I think the brewery was in Nebraska.
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That is really a nice piece, do you have any idea what the square hole would be for? Seems to be an interesting part of the opener..
Yes,Fremont Brewing existed from 189i until prohibition was enacted in 1917. They tried to reopen afterwards,but never did. The diamond shaped hole is called a prestolite key. Prestolite developed a process for filling tanks with acetylene gas (the traditional way was to drip water onto calcium carbide, which produces acetylene gas in real time). The small Prestolite tanks were mounted on bicycles and the running boards of cars (or under the seat), and a copper or brass tube ran to the acetylene lamp(s) on the front.
To light the lamp, the valve on the tank was opened using the "key" (it was a square shank on the valve) by one person, and another person held a match at the lamp, and warned "stand back!" I don't have the start date for Prestolite (I'm thinking circa 1885), but they existed on the cars until circa 1915, then quickly phased out. Sometimes the caplifters had two different sized square holes, so the Prestolite system must have made two different sized tanks/valves. I would suspect that bicycle tanks would be smaller than car tanks.