[1] From an account by Stephen Vail used in Graded Literature Readers, by permission of Truth.
CHAPTER V
ELECTRICITY: LIGHTING, TRANSPORTATION, AND OTHER USES
Man must have discovered artificial light as soon as he discovered fire, for the two exist together. The first light was probably produced by burning sticks or pieces of wood. In his search for more light, man learned how to make the tallow candle. Lights made in one form or other from the fats of animals persisted almost to the threshold of the present. The next step forward was to the use of oil; and the next, to the use of gas.
The first practical use of gas for purposes of illumination was in 1792. In that year William Murdoch, an English engineer, produced gas artificially from coal, and with it lighted his house in Cornwall, a county of England. Nine years afterward a Frenchman named Lebon illuminated his house and garden in Paris with gas produced from wood. Street lighting by gas was introduced in 1807 by an Englishman named F. A. Winzer or Windsor, in Pall Mall, one of the fine streets of London. The first gas lights in America were installed in 1806 by David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, in his residence and in the streets adjacent. Baltimore was the first city in the United States to adopt gas lighting for its streets. This was in 1817.
When gas was first used, there was much opposition to it, as there usually has been to improvements in general. The citizens of Philadelphia protested for more than twenty years against the introduction of gas into that city for purposes of illumination. Some of the newspapers of the time called gas a "folly and a nuisance"; and one of the professors in the University of Pennsylvania declared that even if gas were the good thing its supporters were declaring it to be, tallow candles and oil lamps were good enough for him. But gas triumphed, and to-day the world could scarcely do without it, either for illumination or for fuel.
The electric light had its beginning about 1800 in the experiments of Sir Humphry Davy, a British investigator. He discovered that if two pieces of carbon are brought into contact, completing a circuit through which an electric current flows, and if the carbon points are separated by a short distance, the points will become intensely hot and emit a brilliant light. The word arc, used in connection with the arc lamp or light, refers to the gap or arc between the two carbon points, across which the electric current leaps in creating the light.
Following Sir Humphry Davy's experiments, several arc lights were invented, with greater or less degree of success, and about 1860 electricity was tried successfully for lighting in some lighthouses along the British coast. The widespread usage and the usefulness of the arc electric light, however, are due to Charles Francis Brush, an electrical inventor of Cleveland, Ohio, who in 1876 simplified the arc light so as to bring it into general use for lighting streets, large rooms, halls, and outdoor spaces. Brush was also the inventor of an electric-dynamo machine that has added to his fame. After the invention of the arc light, he took out more than fifty other patents. The incandescent electric light, for lighting residences and small rooms, came a little later as the invention of Edison.