Bill Utley's bright idea is biggest of them all

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TUSTIN, Calif. - In these days of rolling electrical blackouts and warnings to have flashlights always on hand around the house, Bill Utley will never be caught in the dark. He has 4,000 to 6,000 flashlights in his Southern California home, so many that he has lost count.

And these aren't just any old flashlights; many are antiques. In fact, Utley has the largest flashlight collection in the world.

"I didn't start out collecting flashlights just for the sake of collecting," said the 72-year-old retired dentist.

"I actually started out collecting cash registers. But they were so heavy," he said with a chuckle, "I began to get the idea of collecting something smaller."

What makes a flashlight an antique? And how do you define what a flashlight is?

For these answers, you have to know a little about flashlight history. You have to go back to the late 1800s, to a Jewish immigrant named Akibo Horowitz. After immigrating to this country from Russia in the early 1890s, he changed his name to Conrad Hubert.

While operating a novelty shop in 1895, Hubert began selling an electric scarf pin in which a tiny bulb would light when a concealed switch was pressed. It set off a light bulb in his mind that people could use a larger light to find their way around their homes in the dark.

Trouble was, at the time, portable light was impractical. The dry cells used to power such a light were too big and too heavy and didn't last.

Then, in 1897, a man named Misell invented the flashlight. For it, he devised a smaller battery not far from the D battery available today. Hubert bought the patent for the battery and started a company that made flashlights. It became the Eveready Co.

So to the first question of what makes a flashlight an antique, Utley says: "An object must be 100 years old to be legally classified an antique."

Utley does have those 100-year-old flashlights in his collection, including the first flashlight, tubular in design and about 10 inches long. But he also has a lot of flashlights the rest of us might consider antiques, even though they're "only" 60, 70 or 80 years old.

His collection - an array of all shapes, sizes, materials and colors - is in a large room that would normally be the family room of his sprawling ranch house. He has cabinets filled with all kinds of battery-powered lights. They sit atop cabinets already stuffed with them, and many await two new cabinets he has just had made.

Utley has become well known and an expert in antique flashlights since he founded "Flashlight Collectors of America" and began publishing his own newsletter 12 years ago. He recently published a book, "Flashlights: Early Flashlight Makers and 100 Years of Eveready."