GAS LIGHTING
While the rivalry between the candle and the new forms of lamps was at its height, and just as the lamp was gaining complete supremacy, a new method of artificial illumination was discovered that was destined to eclipse all others for half a century, and then finally to succumb to a still better form. As early as the beginning of the eighteenth century the Rev. Joseph Clayton, in England, had made experiments in the distillation of coal, producing a gas that was inflammable. A little later Dr. Stephen Hales published his work on Vegetable Staticks, in which he described the process of distilling coal in which a definite amount of gas could be obtained from a given quantity of coal.
No practical use was made of this discovery, however, until over half a century later. But just at the close of the century a Scot, William Murdoch, became interested in the possibilities of gases as illuminants, and finally demonstrated that coal gas could be put to practical use. In 1798, being employed in the workshops of Boulton and Watt in Birmingham, he fitted up an apparatus in which he manufactured gas, lighting the workshops by means of jets connected by tubes with this primitive plant. Shortly after this, a Frenchman, M. Lebon, lighted his house in Paris with gas distilled from wood, and the Parisians soon became interested in the new illuminant. England seems to have been the first country to use it extensively in public buildings, however, the London Lyceum Theatre being lighted with gas in 1803. By 1810 the great Gas-Light and Coke Company was formed, and within the next five years gas street-lamps had become familiar objects in the streets of London, and house illumination by this means a common thing among the wealthier classes.
In the early days of gas-lighting the results were frequently disappointing, because no suitable and efficient type of burner had been devised; but in 1820 Neilson of Glasgow discovered the principle of the now familiar flat burner, of which more examples still remain in use the world over than of all other kinds combined. Indeed, this simple, but as we now regard it, inefficient burner, would probably have remained the best-known type for many years longer than it did had not the possibilities of lighting by electricity aroused persons interested in the great gas-plants to the fact that the new illuminant was jeopardizing their enormous investments; making it clear that they must bestir themselves and improve their flat burners if they would arrest disaster. To be sure, several modifications of the round Argand burner had been introduced from time to time, some of them being a distinct improvement over the flat burner, but these did not by any means seriously compete with electric light. And it was not until the incandescent mantle was perfected that gas as a brilliant illuminant was able to make a stand against its new competitor.