Some Exceptional Bing Motor Cars

Friday, October 11, 2013
(Yet another beautiful autumn day)

Some Exceptional Bing Motor Cars

   Yesterday was another beautiful day, and so I raked and bagged leaves. I decided to take the day off from blogging, as I had a few errands to do. Last night, I tired and tired to find 1912 Bing cars to match up with the catalogue. At one point, I found "almost" matches, and at the end of 40 minutes, I realized that I had somehow accidentally screen-captured Carette cars-ugh! So I threw out all of the Carette cars, and searched again for "close matches" instead of exact matches. What I also realized is that my one 1912 Bing catalogue was not the best buy. Bing was a huge company in those years, and most likley changed their models every year to match the new cars coming out. So when I tried to match up toys with catalogue sketches, I wasn't going to have much luck.

   I'm going to suggest that you   go file>>new window and bring up my  post from 3 days ago _-"Pages of Motor Cars from the 1912 Bing Catalogue" (Please click here). IN this way, you'll be able to cross-refenerce the Bing catalogue scanned pages with the screen-captured images of actual sold toys. 

   All of the 4 toys were sold at action at prices ranging from $ 11,800.00 - $ 22,000.00 plus commission to the auctioneer.These toys are true antiques - centenarians (100 years or older ) and

are exceptional in having been hand-painted, with loads of details and moving parts. Even the windows were made of glass, and in some cases bevelled glass!

Please click here to visit Bertoia Auction's fine website

What I find interesting is that the headlights are sometimes described as "lanterns". I have a feeling that either the cars at the time did not have batteries, or that the batteries were not capable of providing adequate light to lightbulbs. Or perhaps, car lightbulbs were not even made or invented yet!  I just did a fast search and found that the "lanterns" were in some cases kerosene-based with reflectors. If you do a search on ebay, you will find many example of early lanterns or pre-electric headlights.

There's always questions to be asked and answers to search for!

Thanks for dropping by,

and if you're Canadian, Happy Thanksgiving.

And as always, have a great part of the day or night,

wherever you may be.

Stacey

send me an e-mail anytime at  toysearcher@gmail.com