Background Prior to use of gaseous fuels for lighting, the early lighting fuels consisted of
olive oil,
beeswax,
fish oil,
whale oil,
sesame oil, nut oil, or other similar substances, which were all liquid fuels. These were the most commonly used fuels until the late 18th century. Whale oil was especially widely used for lighting in European cities such as London through the early 19th century. Public illumination preceded by centuries the development and widespread adoption of gas lighting. In 1417, Sir
Henry Barton,
Lord Mayor of London, ordained "Lanthornes with lights to bee hanged out on the Winter evening betwixt
Hallowtide and
Candlemasse." Paris was first illuminated by an order issued in 1524, and, in the beginning of the 16th century, the inhabitants were ordered to keep lights burning in the windows of all houses that faced streets. In 1668, when some regulations were made for improving the streets of London, the residents were reminded to hang out their
lanterns at the usual time, and, in 1690, an order was issued to hang out a light, or lamp, every night at nightfall, from
Michaelmas to Christmas. By an Act of the
Common Council in 1716, all housekeepers, whose houses faced any street, lane, or passage, were required to hang out, every dark night, one or more lights, to burn from six to eleven o'clock, under the penalty of one
shilling as a fine for failing to do so. Accumulating and escaping gases were known originally among coal miners for their adverse effects rather than their useful characteristics. Coal miners described two types of gases, one called the
choke damp and the other
fire damp. In 1667, a paper describing how in Lancashire gas escaping from a coal pit underground could be lit at the surface of a nearby spring. British clergyman and scientist
Stephen Hales experimented with the actual distillation of coal, thereby obtaining a flammable liquid. He reported his results in the first volume of his
Vegetable Statics, published in 1726. From the distillation of "one hundred and fifty-eight
grains [10.2 g] of Newcastle coal, he stated that he obtained 180 cubic inches [2.9 L] of gas, which weighed 51 grains [3.3 g], being nearly one third of the whole." Hales's results garnered attention decades later as the unique chemical properties of various gases became understood through the work of
Joseph Black,
Henry Cavendish,
Alessandro Volta, and others. A 1733 publication by
Sir James Lowther in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society detailed some properties of coal gas, including its flammability. Lowther demonstrated the principal properties of coal gas to different members of the
Royal Society. He showed that the gas retained its flammability after storage for some time. The demonstration did not result in identification of utility. Minister and experimentalist
John Clayton referred to coal gas as the "spirit" of coal. He discovered its flammability by an accident. The "spirit" he isolated from coal caught fire by coming in contact with a candle as it escaped from a fracture in one of his distillation vessels. He stored the coal gas in bladders, and at times he entertained his friends by demonstrating the flammability of the gas. Clayton published his findings in
Philosophical Transactions.
Early technology , British Museum) It took nearly 200 years for gas to become accessible for commercial use. A Flemish alchemist,
Jan Baptista van Helmont, was the first person to formally recognize gas as a state of matter. He would go on to identify several types of gases, including carbon dioxide. Over one hundred years later in 1733, Sir
James Lowther had some of his miners working on a water pit for his mine. While digging the pit they hit a pocket of gas. Lowther took a sample of the gas and took it home to do some experiments. He noted, "The said air being put into a bladder … and tied close, may be carried away, and kept some days, and being afterwards pressed gently through a small pipe into the flame of a candle, will take fire, and burn at the end of the pipe as long as the bladder is gently pressed to feed the flame, and when taken from the candle after it is so lighted, it will continue burning till there is no more air left in the bladder to supply the flame." Lowther had basically discovered the principle behind gas lighting. Later in the 18th century
William Murdoch (sometimes spelled "Murdock") stated: "the gas obtained by distillation from coal, peat, wood and other inflammable substances burnt with great brilliancy upon being set fire to … by conducting it through tubes, it might be employed as an economical substitute for lamps and candles." Murdoch's first invention was a lantern with a gas-filled bladder attached to a jet. He would use this to walk home at night. After seeing how well this worked he decided to light his home with gas. In 1797, Murdoch installed gas lighting in his new home as well as the workshop in which he worked. "This work was of a large scale, and he next experimented to find better ways of producing, purifying, and burning the gas." The foundation had been laid for companies to start producing gas and other inventors to start playing with ways of using the new technology. Murdoch was the first to exploit the flammability of gas for the practical application of lighting. He worked for
Matthew Boulton and
James Watt at their
Soho Foundry steam engine works in
Birmingham, England. In the early 1790s, while overseeing the use of his company's steam engines in
tin mining in Cornwall, Murdoch began experimenting with various types of gas, finally settling on
coal gas as the most effective. He first lit his own house in
Redruth, Cornwall in 1792. In 1798, he used gas to light the main building of the Soho Foundry and in 1802 lit the outside in a public display of gas lighting, the lights astonishing the local population. One of the employees at the Soho Foundry,
Samuel Clegg, saw the potential of this new form of lighting. Clegg left his job to set up his own gas lighting business, the
Gas Light and Coke Company. A "thermolampe" using
gas distilled from wood was patented in 1799, while German inventor Friedrich Winzer (
Frederick Albert Winsor) was the first person to patent coal-gas lighting in 1804. In 1801, Phillipe Lebon of Paris had also used gas lights to illuminate his house and gardens, and was considering how to light all of Paris. In 1820, Paris adopted gas street lighting. In 1804,
William Henry delivered a course of lectures on chemistry, at
Manchester, in which he showed the mode of producing gas from coal, and the facility and advantage of its use. Henry analysed the composition and investigated the properties of carburetted hydrogen gas (i.e. methane). His experiments were numerous and accurate and made upon a variety of substances; having obtained the gas from wood,
peat, different kinds of coal, oil, wax, etc., he quantified the intensity of the light from each source. In 1806 The Philips and Lee factory and a portion of Chapel Street in Salford, Lancashire were lit by gas, thought to be the first use of gas street lighting in the world.
Josiah Pemberton, an inventor, had for some time been experimenting on the nature of gas. A resident of Birmingham, his attention may have been roused by the exhibition at Soho. About 1806, he exhibited gas lights in a variety of forms and with great brilliance at the front of his factory in Birmingham. In 1808 he constructed an apparatus, applicable for several uses, for
Benjamin Cooke, a manufacturer of
brass tubes,
gilt toys, and other articles. In 1808, Murdoch presented to the
Royal Society a paper entitled "Account of the Application of Gas from Coal to Economical Purposes" in which he described his successful application of coal gas to light the extensive establishment of Messrs. Phillips and Lea. For this paper he was awarded
Count Rumford's gold medal. Murdoch's statements threw great light on the comparative advantage of gas and candles, and contained much useful information on the expenses of production and management. Although the history is uncertain,
David Melville has been credited with the first house and street lighting in the United States, in either 1805 or 1806 in
Newport, Rhode Island. In 1809, accordingly, the first application was made to
Parliament to incorporate a company in order to accelerate the process, but the bill failed to pass. In 1810, however, the application was renewed by the same parties, and though some opposition was encountered and considerable expense incurred, the bill passed, but not without great alterations; and the London and Westminster
Gas Light and Coke Company was established. Less than two years later, on 31 December 1813,
Westminster Bridge was lit by gas.
Widespread use (
Brooklyn, New York, 1873–1897) , c. 1875) Among the economic impacts of gas lighting was much longer work hours in factories. This was particularly important in Great Britain during the winter months when nights are significantly longer. Factories could even work continuously over 24 hours, resulting in increased production. Following successful commercialization, gas lighting spread to other countries. In England, the first place outside London to have gas lighting was
Preston, Lancashire, in 1816; this was due to the Preston Gaslight Company run by revolutionary
Joseph Dunn, who found the most improved way of brighter gas lighting. The parish church there was the first religious building to be lit by gas lighting. In
Bristol, a Gas Light Company was founded on 15 December 1815. Under the supervision of the engineer, John Brelliat, extensive works were conducted in 1816–17 to build a gasholder, mains and street lights. Many of the principal streets in the centre of the city, as well as nearby houses, had switched to gas lighting by the end of 1817. In America,
Seth Bemis lit his factory with gas illumination from 1812 to 1813. The use of gas lights in
Rembrandt Peale's Museum in
Baltimore in 1816 was a great success. Baltimore was the first American city with gas street lights; Peale's Gas Light Company of Baltimore on 7 February 1817 lit its first street lamp at Market and Lemon Streets (currently Baltimore and Holliday Streets). The first private residence in the US to be illuminated by gas has been variously identified as that of
David Melville (c. 1806), as described above, or of William Henry, a
coppersmith, at 200 Lombard Street,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1816. In 1817, at the three stations of the Chartered Gas Company in London, 25
chaldrons (24 m3) of coal were
carbonized daily, producing of gas. This supplied gas lamps equal to 75,000
Argand lamps each yielding the light of six candles. At the City Gas Works, in Dorset Street,
Blackfriars, three chaldrons of coal were carbonized each day, providing the gas equivalent of 9,000 Argand lamps. So 28 chaldrons of coal were carbonized daily, and 84,000 lights supplied by those two companies only. At this period the principal difficulty in gas manufacture was purification. Mr. D. Wilson, of Dublin, patented a method for purifying coal gas by means of the chemical action of
ammoniacal gas. Another plan was devised by Reuben Phillips, of
Exeter, who patented the purification of coal gas by the use of dry
lime. G. Holworthy, in 1818, patented a method of purifying it by passing the gas, in a highly condensed state, through iron
retorts heated to a dark red. In 1820, Swedish inventor
Johan Patrik Ljungström had developed a gas lighting with copper apparatuses and
chandeliers of
ink,
brass and
crystal, reportedly one of the first such public installations of gas lighting in the region, enhanced as a
triumphal arch for the
city gate for a
royal visit of
Charles XIV John of Sweden in 1820. By 1823, numerous towns and cities throughout Britain were lit by gas. Gas light cost up to 75% less than
oil lamps or candles, which helped to accelerate its development and deployment. By 1859, gas lighting was to be found all over Britain and about a thousand
gas works had sprung up to meet the demand for the new fuel. The brighter lighting which gas provided allowed people to read more easily and for longer. This helped to stimulate literacy and learning, speeding up the second
Industrial Revolution. In 1824 the
English Association for Gas Lighting on the Continent, a sizeable business producing gas for several cities in mainland, Europe, including Berlin, was established, with
Sir William Congreve, 2nd Baronet as general manager. The 1839 invention, the
Bude-Light, provided a brighter and more economical lamp.
Oil-gas appeared in the field as a rival of coal gas. In 1815,
John Taylor patented an apparatus for the decomposition of "oil" and other animal substances. Public attention was attracted to "oil-gas" by the display of the patent apparatus at
Apothecary's Hall, by
Taylor & Martineau. In 1891 the gas mantle was invented by the Austrian chemist
Carl Auer von Welsbach. This eliminated the need for special illuminating gas (a synthetic mixture of
hydrogen and
hydrocarbon gases produced by
destructive distillation of
bituminous coal or
peat) to get bright shining flames.
Acetylene was also used from about 1898 for gas lighting on a smaller scale. Illuminating gas was used for gas lighting, as it produces a much brighter light than natural gas or
water gas. Illuminating gas was much less toxic than other forms of coal gas, but less could be produced from a given quantity of coal. The experiments with distilling coal were described by John Clayton in 1684. George Dixon's pilot plant exploded in 1760, setting back the production of illuminating gas a few years. The first commercial application was in a
Manchester cotton mill in 1806. In 1901, studies of the
defoliant effect of leaking
gas pipes led to the discovery that ethylene is a
plant hormone. Throughout the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th, the gas was manufactured by the
gasification of coal. Later in the 19th century, natural gas began to replace coal gas, first in the US, and then in other parts of the world. In the United Kingdom, coal gas was used until the early 1970s.
Russia The history of the Russian gas industry began with retired Lieutenant Pyotr Sobolevsky (1782–1841), who improved
Philippe le Bon's design for a "thermolamp" and presented it to Emperor
Alexander I in 1811; in January 1812, Sobolevsky was instructed to draw up a plan for gas street-lighting for St. Petersburg. The
French invasion of Russia delayed implementation, but St. Petersburg's Governor General
Mikhail Miloradovich, who had seen the gas lighting of Vienna, Paris and other European cities, initiated experimental work on gas lighting for the capital, using British apparatus for obtaining gas from pit coal, and by the autumn of 1819, Russia's first gas street light was lit on one of the streets on
Aptekarsky Island. In February 1835, the Company for Gas Lighting St. Petersburg was founded. In 1817 the Lyceum,
Drury Lane, and Covent Garden theatres were all lit by gas. Gas was brought into the building by "miles of rubber tubing from outlets in the floor called 'water joints'" which "carried the gas to border-lights and wing lights". But before it was distributed, the gas came through a central distribution point called a "gas table", which varied the brightness by regulating the gas supply, and the gas table, which allowed control of separate parts of the stage. Thus it became the first stage 'switchboard'. By the 1850s, gas lighting in theatres had spread practically all over the United States and Europe. Some of the largest installations of gas lighting were in large auditoriums, like the
Théâtre du Chatelet, built in 1862. In 1875, the new
Paris Opera was constructed. "Its lighting system contained more than twenty-eight miles [] of gas piping, and its gas table had no fewer than eighty-eight stopcocks, which controlled nine hundred and sixty gas jets." Gaslight was the leading cause of behaviour change in theatres. They were no longer places for mingling and orange selling, but places of respected entertainment.
Types of lighting instruments There were six types of burners, but four burners were really experimented with: • The first burner used was the single-jet burner, which produced a small flame. The tip of the burner was made out of lead, which absorbed heat, causing the flame to be smaller in size. It was discovered that the flame would burn brighter if the metal was mixed with other components, such as porcelain. • Flat burners were invented mainly to distribute gas and light evenly to the systems. • The fishtail burner was similar to the flat burner, but it produced a brighter flame and conducted less heat. • The last burner that was experimented with was the
Welsbach burner. Around this time the
Bunsen burner was in use along with some forms of electricity. The Welsbach was based on the idea of the Bunsen burner, still using gas. A cotton mesh with
cerium and
thorium was imbedded into the Welsbach. This source of light was named the gas mantle; it produced three times more light than the naked flame. Several different instruments were used for
stage lighting in the 19th century fell; these included footlights, border lights, groundrows, lengths, bunch lights, conical reflector floods, and limelight spots. These mechanisms sat directly on the stage, blinding the eyes of the audience. •
Footlights caused the actors' costumes to catch fire if they got too close. These lights also caused bothersome heat that affected both audience members and actors. Again, the actors had to adapt to these changes. They started fireproofing their costumes and placing wire mesh in front of the footlights. • Border lights, also known as
striplights, were a row of lights that hung horizontally in the
flies. Color was added later by dying cotton, wool, and silk cloth. • Lengths were constructed the same way as border lights, but mounted vertically in the rear where the wings were. • Bunch lights were a cluster of burners that sat on a vertical base that was fuelled directly from the gas line. • The conical reflector can be related to the
Fresnel lens used today. This adjustable box of light reflected a beam whose size could be altered by a barndoor. • Limelight spots are similar to today's current spotlighting system. This instrument was used in scene shops, as well as the stage. Gas lighting did have some disadvantages. "Several hundred theatres are said to have burned down in America and Europe between 1800 and the introduction of electricity in the late 1800s. The increased heat was objectionable, and the border lights and wing lights had to be lighted by a long stick with a flaming wad of cotton at the end. For many years, an attendant or gas boy moved along the long row of jets, lighting them individually while gas was escaping from the whole row. Both actors and audiences complained of the escaping gas, and explosions sometimes resulted from its accumulation." While electric lighting was introduced to theatre stages, the gas mantle was developed in 1885 for gas-lit theatres. "This was a beehive-shaped mesh of knitted thread impregnated with lime that, in miniature, converted the naked gas flame into in effect, a lime-light." Electric lighting slowly took over in theatres. In the 20th century, it enabled better and safer theatre productions, with no smell, relatively very little heat, and more freedom for designers.
Decline In the early 20th century, most cities in North America and Europe had gaslit streets, and most railway station platforms had gas lights too. However, around 1880 gas lighting for streets and train stations began giving way to high voltage (3,000–6,000 volt)
direct current and
alternating current arc lighting systems. This time period also saw the development of the first electric power utility designed for indoor use. The new system by inventor
Thomas Edison was designed to function similar to gas lighting. For reasons of safety and simplicity it used
direct current (DC) at a relatively low 110 volts to light
incandescent light bulbs. Voltage in wires steadily declines as distance increases, and at this low voltage power plants needed to be within about of the lamps. This
voltage drop problem made DC distribution relatively expensive and gas lighting retained widespread usage with new buildings sometimes constructed with dual systems of gas piping and electrical wiring connected to each room, to diversify the power sources for lighting. The development of new
alternating current power transmission systems in the 1880s and 90s by companies such as
Ganz and
AEG in Europe and
Westinghouse Electric and
Thomson-Houston in the US solved the voltage and distance problem by using high
transmission line voltages, and
transformers to drop the voltage for distribution for indoor lighting. Alternating current technology overcame many of the limitations of direct current, enabling the rapid growth of reliable, low-cost
electrical power networks which finally spelled the end of widespread usage of gas lighting. ==Modern usage==