How to Clean a Crystal Chandelier
There is a fair chance your ceiling chandelier is a far cry from the earliest chandeliers – which were simply wooden crosses with four arms, with spikes nailed into the ends of each arm, so that candles could be driven onto them. These could be hoisted up to a suitable height with a rope. As you could imagine, these would drip wax all over your floor, blacken your roof with smoke, and probably not need very much cleaning – they’d need a lot more than cleaning to make them look presentable! As chandeliers grew more ornate, some kept the rope-hoisting apparatus – which has saved the heroes of so many movies, when somebody can swing down on it from above, dropping the chandelier on the villain and leaving the rope at just the right height for the hero or heroine to be swung to safety by their rescuer! While I’m sure we’ll neither be getting out the sandpaper and wax-scraping knife to clean your chandelier, nor unhooking the rope and letting it fall to the ground in order to get to it more easily, it is interesting to think of the earlier chandeliers.
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