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Price's Candles, founded in 1830, is an importer and retailer of candles. The firm is headquartered in Bedford, England, and holds the royal warrant of appointment for the supply of candles. It is one of the largest candle suppliers in the United Kingdom.
In 1840, the product was introduced around Queen Victoria's wedding. It was traditional for every household to burn a candle in its front room window on the evening of the monarch's wedding. Price's stearin 'composite' candles made from a mixture of refined tallow and coconut oil saw an increase in sales on 20 February in London.
Price's Patent Candle is said to have a long and close association with the Royal Family. When the launch of their new composite candle coincided with the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, there had been an ongoing royal connection. Price's Patent Candle has held the royal warrant—either in its name or through its subsidiaries Francis Tucker and Charles Farris—since the 1850s. Today it holds the royal warrant [1] in its name for Her Majesty the Queen. The status as a warrant holder means that it supplies candles for all royal state occasions—coronations, weddings, lyings-in-state, and funerals.
There was a potential market in England for a mid-priced candle that gave a brighter, cleaner light than tallow but was not as expensive as beeswax. William Wilson and his partner discovered a new raw material and a scientific process in 1830 that allowed them to manufacture such a candle. The firm they set up, Edward Price and Co., would make candles from coconut. Wilson took out a license on an 1829 patent for the hydraulic separation of coconut fats, the partners built a candle factory at Vauxhall on the Thames in South West London, a crushing mill just upriver at Battersea , and invested in 1,000 acres of coconut plantation in Sri Lanka. The initial results were not very successful, but the infant company had a couple of good breaks: in 1831 candle tax was abolished and by 1835 it had developed better chemical processes to obtain solid fats.
In the 1820s a French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul, published his research on fatty acids. By mixing a strong alkali with vegetable or animal fats he discovered that the solution separated into liquid and solid components. This technique, known as saponification, was already used by soap makers, but nobody had employed it for candle manufacture. William Wilson's son, George, experimented with this process; by adding a further distillation using a vacuum or high-pressure steam he improved Chevreuil's chemistry. Price's were now able to refine tallow and vegetable oils to produce a harder, pure white fat called stearin. Candles made from this burned brightly without smoke or smell. The same method could also be applied to a range of raw materials that had previously been unusable—skin fat, bone fat, fish oil, and industrial waste greases were all rendered into hard white candles.
Another of George Wilson's innovations allowed Price's to use a second overlooked tropical product—Palm oil, extracted from the palm nut, harvested and processed in West Africa. Soap makers were already using the oil but its dark orange-brown colour made it unattractive for candle-making. Wilson invented a process for cleaning palm oil with sulfuric acid and a new cheap source of fat was available. There was an additional advantage to using palm oil. The region that produced the oil—present-day Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo—was also the centre of the African slave trade. Slavery had been abolished in Britain and its colonies by 1833, [2] but a huge and lucrative market for African slaves continued in the United States, Brazil, and Arabia. Palm oil provided an economic alternative to the slave trade and was actively encouraged by the British government. Slavery had become immensely unpopular in Britain and 'politically correct' products like Price's palm oil candles and non-slave-produced sugar were very popular. In 1847, when Edward Price and Co became Price's Patent Candle, the new joint stock company considered its ethical use of palm oil so significant that it became the basis for the company's seal which depicted Africans bringing calabashes of palm oil to a seated Britannia figure under a palm tree.
In 1840, the company employed 84 staff; by 1855, with two factories in London and one in Bromborough Pool, this figure had risen to 2,300 of whom 1,200 were boys. To a Victorian factory owner, child labour was logical and attractive: it was cheap, flexible, and in some cases carried out intricate tasks that adults were incapable of. At Price's Patent Candle nightlights and candle packaging were "turned out by the deft fingers" of its child employees. William had worked for the London Missionary Society in his youth and his son James was an earnest and evangelical Christian, so James was so concerned for the well-being of his child employees that in 1849 he had set up a Christian society at the factory. Each boy was given his "own drawer with lock and key in which to keep his own testament, prayer book, hymn book, arithmetic book, slate and copy book". Boys were encouraged to attend a religious service in the factory in the morning and to go to the factory school in the evening; they were rewarded with games of cricket and outings in the summer. James's religious and education programme was radical for its time - it was most unusual for a factory owner to be treating his workers in such a way. Other examples of this attitude were the free breakfasts and suppers for night shift workers and warm baths for the boys.
Price's attitude was an enduring one that continued beyond the Wilson family. The company sought to build good quality housing for its workers in London but could not buy any land. However, the Wirral factory at Bromborough Pool—"our colony on the Mersey"—was a green field site. Here Price's eventually built a village of 147 houses with church, institute, shop and library for its workforce of "come downs" (the Battersea families who migrated to the new factory). This model village was an inspiration to other employers and the idea was used at Lever's Port Sunlight factory adjacent to Bromborough in the 1880s and by Cadbury's Bourneville village in the 1890s. Other examples of the company's approach to its employees included the introduction of a profit-sharing scheme for all staff in 1869 and a contributory employees' pension in 1893—the first scheme in the country to include floor workers.
William Wilson's other son, George, had become a company chemist and with his assistant George Gwynne, was responsible for many of these new chemical processes. The company acquired a reputation for innovation and it generally had first refusal to work on any newly patented inventions. As well as industrial chemistry there was the development of mass production processes. In 1849, they installed a system that moved candle moulds around the factory on a railway. By 1864 a new method of ejecting candles from moulds using compressed air pushed candle production to 14 tons a day. A decade later increased mechanisation allowed Price's Patent Candle to produce 32 million nightlights a year.
Price's Patent Candle processes for producing stearin gave them a commercial edge over those competitors who were still making ordinary tallow candles. However, the saponification and distillation processes that Price's Patent Candle used required two and a half times the quantity of raw material. Unless they could find a way of using the waste products a stearin candle would remain twice as expensive to produce as an ordinary tallow one.
One of the products separated out by saponification was a liquid fat called oleine, which was separated from the stearin by compression. Wilson discovered that it could be used as a light lubricating oil and successfully marketed it to English woollen and cotton manufacturers as a cloth oil for mechanical looms where it quickly replaced olive oil. This was the first of a range of lubricating oils that Price's Patent Candle would go on to develop. By experimenting with the heavy waste oil and by blending these mineral oils with animal and vegetable oleines, Price's Patent Candle developed a range of specific lubricants for rifles, sewing machines, bicycles, steam engines and gas engines.
For the first 30 years of the 20th century Price's Patent Candle dominated this market; their Huile de Luxe and 'Motorine' were major products. As early as 1902 an attempt to drive to the South Pole was made using a car lubricated by Price's Oils as were, more successfully, the Norton motorbikes that won at Le Mans in the 1920s. From 1906 and for 30 years after all Rolls-Royce's new cars were sold supplied with Motorine oil—the Rolls-Royce of lubricants for the Rolls-Royce of cars. In 1928, Price's Patent Candle received the Royal Warrant from The Prince of Wales for their motor oils.
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By 1900, Price's Patent Candle was producing 130 differently named and specified sizes of candle, any one of which could in theory be manufactured in 60 different permutations of material, colour, and hardness; the company regularly held 2,000 different standard candle products in stock. Candles were created for many needs: carriages, pianos, dining rooms, bedrooms, servants' bedrooms (that only lasted 30 minutes), and photographic darkrooms. They also made "The Burglar's Horror!" nightlight (to be lit in every front and back window and designed to scare off criminals) and candles for coal miners, the navy, engineers, and emigration ships. To compete with other sources of light candles now needed to be sophisticated. Tapered Venetians, spirals, flutes, and candles with self-fitting ends in many colours replaced the utilitarian white, cylindrical products of the mid-century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Price's Patent Candle designed 'Art-Deco' candles and coordinated candlesticks as a luxury range and appealed to the growing children's market with Noah's Ark nightlight holders, birthday cake candles, and a range of Walt Disney candle merchandise.
In 1910, Price's Patent Candle acquired its first overseas factories in Johannesburg and by 1915 the company owned six factories in South Africa, Shanghai and Chile. Price's Patent Candle went on to construct factories in Rhodesia, Morocco, Pakistan, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
After its interlude as a public company, Price's Patent Candles became a successful privately owned business. Turnover increased five-fold between 1991 and 1998, and the company is once again the largest British-owned candlemaker with over 300 employees. In 2001 Price’s Patent Candles [3] relocated their headquarters to Bedford, Bedfordshire, incorporating a warehouse where they remain today. 2003 saw the acquisition of Price’s Patent Candle by the Italian-owned company Sgarbi which in turn sold on to another Italian company SER [4] in 2004. The majority of Price’s Patent Candle candle manufacturing is now done at SER’s headquarters in Turin with the sales and distribution both nationally and internationally still coordinated from Bedford.
In a consumer-led market where 80% of candle sales are now purely decorative, the company has focussed on new ranges of perfumed and essential oil candles and aromatherapy products. Price's Patent Candle design team, at the headquarters building in Bedford has stayed in touch with the London fashion scene.
Price’s Candles won best display stand at a 2019 Home Hardware trade show. [5]
A candle is an ignitable wick embedded in wax, or another flammable solid substance such as tallow, that provides light, and in some cases, a fragrance. A candle can also provide heat or a method of keeping time. Candles have been used for over two millennia around the world, and were a significant form of indoor lighting until the invention of other types of light sources. Although electric light has largely made candle use nonessential for illumination, candles are still commonly used for functional, symbolic and aesthetic purposes and in specific cultural and religious settings.
Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are used as thickeners, components of some lubricants, and precursors to catalysts.
Vegetable oils, or vegetable fats, are oils extracted from seeds or from other parts of edible plants. Like animal fats, vegetable fats are mixtures of triglycerides. Soybean oil, grape seed oil, and cocoa butter are examples of seed oils, or fats from seeds. Olive oil, palm oil, and rice bran oil are examples of fats from other parts of plants. In common usage, vegetable oil may refer exclusively to vegetable fats which are liquid at room temperature. Vegetable oils are usually edible.
Tallow is a rendered form of beef or mutton suet, primarily made up of triglycerides.
Saponification is a process of cleaving esters into carboxylate salts and alcohols by the action of aqueous alkali. Typically aqueous sodium hydroxide solutions are used. It is an important type of alkaline hydrolysis. When the carboxylate is long chain, its salt is called a soap. The saponification of ethyl acetate gives sodium acetate and ethanol:
Stearin, or tristearin, or glyceryl tristearate is an odourless, white powder. It is a triglyceride derived from three units of stearic acid. Most triglycerides are derived from at least two and more commonly three different fatty acids. Like other triglycerides, stearin can crystallise in three polymorphs. For stearin, these melt at 54 (α-form), 65, and 72.5 °C (β-form).
Stearic acid is a saturated fatty acid with an 18-carbon chain. The IUPAC name is octadecanoic acid. It is a soft waxy solid with the formula CH3(CH2)16CO2H. The triglyceride derived from three molecules of stearic acid is called stearin. Stearic acid is a prevalent fatty-acid in nature, found in many animal and vegetable fats, but is usually higher in animal fat than vegetable fat. It has a melting point of 69.4 °C (156.9 °F) °C and a pKa of 4.50.
Cottonseed oil is cooking oil from the seeds of cotton plants of various species, mainly Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium herbaceum, that are grown for cotton fiber, animal feed, and oil.
Shortening is any fat that is a solid at room temperature and is used to make crumbly pastry and other food products.
Biodiesel production is the process of producing the biofuel, biodiesel, through the chemical reactions of transesterification and esterification. This process renders a product (chemistry) and by-products.
Saponification value or saponification number represents the number of milligrams of potassium hydroxide (KOH) or sodium hydroxide (NaOH) required to saponify one gram of fat under the conditions specified. It is a measure of the average molecular weight of all the fatty acids present in the sample in form of triglycerides. The higher the saponification value, the lower the fatty acids average length, the lighter the mean molecular weight of triglycerides and vice versa. Practically, fats or oils with high saponification value are more suitable for soap making.
Bromborough Dock was situated on the River Mersey at Bromborough, on the Wirral Peninsula, England. Owned by the manufacturer Lever Brothers, it served the company's factory at Port Sunlight. The facility was once the largest private dock in the world.
Palm kernel oil is an edible plant oil derived from the kernel of the oil palm tree Elaeis guineensis. It is related to two other edible oils: palm oil, extracted from the fruit pulp of the oil palm, and coconut oil, extracted from the kernel of the coconut.
Candle making was developed independently in a number of countries around the world.
Oleochemistry is the study of vegetable oils and animal oils and fats, and oleochemicals derived from these fats and oils. The resulting product can be called oleochemicals (from Latin: oleum "olive oil"). The major product of this industry is soap, approximately 8.9×106 tons of which were produced in 1990. Other major oleochemicals include fatty acids, fatty acid methyl esters, fatty alcohols and fatty amines. Glycerol is a side product of all of these processes. Intermediate chemical substances produced from these basic oleochemical substances include alcohol ethoxylates, alcohol sulfates, alcohol ether sulfates, quaternary ammonium salts, monoacylglycerols (MAG), diacylglycerols (DAG), structured triacylglycerols (TAG), sugar esters, and other oleochemical products.
Shaving soap is a hard soap that is used to produce lather with a shaving brush. The lather it produces is used to coat the face during shaving, softening the hair in preparation for shaving.
In the food industry and biochemistry, interesterification (IE) is a process that rearranges the fatty acids of a fat product, typically a mixture of triglycerides. The process implies breaking and reforming the ester bonds C–O–C that connect the fatty acid chains to the glycerol hubs of the fat molecules. The reactions involve catalysts, either inorganic chemicals or enzymes.
Palm stearin is the solid fraction of palm oil that is produced by partial crystallization at controlled temperature. It is a stearin in the sense of stearins and oleins being the solid and liquid fractions respectively of fats and oils; not in the sense of glyceryl tristearate.
Palmolive is an American multinational brand of a line of products produced by Colgate-Palmolive. The Palmolive brand grew from one product, Palmolive bar soap. Made of coconut, palm and olive oils, Palmolive bar soap was introduced in 1898. Originally, the bar soap floated like Procter & Gamble's Ivory bar soap. By the turn of the 20th century, Palmolive bar soap was the world's best-selling soap.
George Fergusson Wilson was an English industrial chemist.