Lantern

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A lantern is a device used to carry light. The most common forms carry either a candle or a wick extending out from a small tank of oil.

Constructing a Lantern

Hugh Platt's Jewell House of Art and Nature gives the following instructions for constructing a lantern:

A cheape Lanterne, wherein a burning candle may be carried, in any stormie or windie weather, without any horne, glasse, paper or other defensative, before it.

Make a foure-square box, of 6. or 7. inches everie waie, and 17. or 18. inches in length, with a socket in the bottome thereof, close the sides well either with dove tailes or cement, so as they take no aire, leave in the middest of one of the sides a slit or open dore, to put in the candle, which from the bottome to the top thereof may contain 6. or 7. inches in length, and twoe and a halfe in bredth, place your candle in the socket, and though it stand open and naked to the ayre without any defense, yet the winde will have no power to extinguish the same. The reason seemeth to be because the box is already full of ayre, whereby there is no roome or place to containe any more, neither can the ayre finde any thorough passage, by reason of the closeness thereof. The socket would be made to screw in and out at the bottom and then you may put in your candle before you fasten the socket. This is borrowed of one of the rarest Mathematicians of our age.

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