Would anyone be able to help me identify a particular style of narrow beam flashlight if I upload a sketch I drew of it? I had this light as a kid and have never seen another one since. Would love to find one again. It was a D cell light that looked to be from the 40’s or 50’s. The lens was housed in a narrow tube about the size of a roll of nickles. Thank you in advance!
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It is a Perfection projection pointer.
Made by Williams Brown & Earl. There are a few different variations of them.
They typically had little symbols or emblems or arrows or things in the end that would show an image similar to a bat signal. Not sure if they came with different inserts to present different shapes in the beam. They would be used like a modern-day laser to point out things in a classroom or other setting with information on a screen or wall. I’ve seen and played with one like it a few years ago. I’m not sure if it was made by the same company.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1190396050/vintage-williams-brown-earle-perfection
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Thank you! And the link you sent was my exact flashlight I had back then. Appreciate your help!
Interesting
Pretty amazing that you knew exactly what this light was…and from a sketch at that…
Well I cheated a little bit.
I used Google lens.
That didn’t get me anywhere.
Then I added the search term of “1950 flashlight”.
That still didn’t get me anywhere.
I thought a little more about the research that I did a few years ago when handling one.
And I added the search term “pointer” because I vaguely remembered that was part of the name.
I only had to scroll through about a dozen pictures at that point to spot one.
The one that I handled definitely had the image of an arrow in the very tight beam.
Some friends of ours have it and they asked me what I thought of it and what it was for. I guessed that it was an old school laser pointer. We did some googling at the time and that’s what turned up.
I’m still not positive it’s exactly like the one that I linked to above. I’ll likely go see them in the next month or so and I’ll get a picture of it. I’ll definitely get pictures of the beam also.
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Impressive detective work! I tried eBay, ChatGPT, and Google and didn’t find anything close. The I found this forum and posted my sketch. And BOOM- you had the answer within an hour or so!
Glad I found this place, I have a collection of vintage flashlights- I try to pick one up whenever I travel. I’m sure I can learn a lot from this group.
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Hope you share some more with us.
Welcome to BLF. Great initial post!
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