Gaslight
NAME: Gaslight
ALTERATIVE NAME: None
LANGUAGE: French and English
TIME: 1780-90s
LOCATION: Scotland; Paris, France; and Redruth and Birmingham, England
CATEGORY: Technology
DISCIPLINE: Invention
SHORT DESCRIPTION: Light produced from coal-gas, a by-product of the distillation of coal tar, which was first produced commercially in England in the early 19th century.
DESCRIPTION:
Gas light was first created in the late 18th century in France and England, when the lighting qualities of wood-gas and coal-gas were first investigated and were then used to create artificial light. Ever since the discovery of 'gas pingue', in the late 16th century by the Flemish chemist Van Helmont*, inflammable airs had been investigated by chemists and natural philosophers.
In 1618 Jean Tardin studied a burning seepage of natural gas and concluded that it had something in common with the flames from burning oil or coal, but coal-gas itself was not made until the 1690s, when John Clayton, rector of Crofton near Wakefield, heated coal in the presence of water to produce methane.
The earliest experiments with coal-gas lighting happened in Northern England. In 1667 at Wigan Thomas Shirley wrote to the Royal Society describing inflammable air issuing from a coal mine; then, in 1730 at Whitehaven, James Lowther passed 'damp air' (fire-damp) through a pipe from the workings of one of his mines near to the surface, burned it continuously, and the same year took the Royal Society samples of the gas, in bladders, and showed that it would burn at the mouth of a tube.
The first fully documented attempt to light a room by coal-gas was in Newcastle, however, by the colliery owner George Dixon who, in about 1760, using a kettle as a retort, experimented with gas conducted through sections of clay tobacco-pipe to burners made by piercing holes in the clay.
Nevertheless, no practical result followed from this or from the development of the tar-making oven, in spite of Archibald Cochrane*, ninth Earl of Dundonald's successful attempts in 1784 to ignite gas flames at his coal tar* ovens at Culross.
While unable to exploit this discovery through lack of funds, Cochrane apparently told Watt*of his discovery during a visit to Boulton* and Watt's Soho Works in 1786, and the year before published his 'Account of the Qualities and Uses of Coal Tar and Coal Varnish' (1785).
Meanwhile, also in 1784, Jean Pierre Minkelers, professor of natural philosophy at Louvain, France, published his 'Memoire sur l'air inflammable' on the preparation of gas from coal tar and other organic solids for the inflation of hot-air balloons, and is also said to have lighted his classroom with coal gas for several years.
Despite all these, and several other, attempts to establish effective gas lighting (for example, at the Elector's castle at Dresden during the 1780s and 1790s), only two of the early experimenters, Philippe Lebon and Murdock*, were successful in developing it as a commercial application.
In 1791 Lebon, having grown up in a region of charcoal-burners, began the study of gas produced by heating wood, and decided that wood-gas could be satisfactorily prepared in an iron retort, cooled, and then used for lighting, heating, or inflating balloons.
He moved to Paris in 1798 and conducted experiments on a larger scale in a house where gas was used both to warm and light the interior, and to provide lighting in the garden. Lebon not only demonstrated the practical usefulness of the gas, but also anticipated nearly all its later applications: the soft light burning in a glass globe, and the distribution of the gas through the house by small pipes concealed in the plaster.
However, two months after he exhibited and received a patent for this "thermolampe" (September 1799), the war with England left the French government too preoccupied to invest in the invention.
Almost simultaneously, the young Scots mechanic William Murdock was making similar investigations into the possibility of gas lighting. In 1779 he had been sent by his employers, the engineering firm of Matthew Boulton and James Watt at Soho, Birmingham, to Cornwall to supervise the fitting of Watt's steam engines.
While there, in 1791, an interest in finding improved materials for preserving ship hulls led him to make tar by distillation of coal, and in 1792 he developed the gas jet lighting fixture, with which he was able to use the coal-gas generated in the process to light the rooms of his house and offices at Redruth, Cornwall.
Immediately concerned with the commercial possibilities of this discovery, Murdock experimented with coal of different qualities, various types of burners, and devices for storing enough gas to make portable lights. In 1798 he was called back to the Soho Foundry where he used cast-iron retorts, brought to a red heat, to generate the gas, with which he successfully illuminated the main building of the works "during many successive nights".
It appears that although Murdock continued to develop practical methods for making, storing, and purifying coal-gas over the next few years, the company lost interest in the technology until 1801 - when James Watt's son Gregory reported back on Lebon's work in Paris and Murdock was encouraged to resume his experiments - and in March 1802 he installed gas flares at each end of the main Soho building to celebrate the Peace of Amiens.
By 1804 Murdock had perfected his apparatus, and Boulton and Watt were able to canvass for orders. The first customer was George Lee of the firm Phillips and Lee, owners of a large Salford cotton-mill, who in 1806-07 installed over 900 gas lights to illuminate the factory, a private road and a house.
Some of the burners were Argands, adapted from the Swiss oil-lamp, but the majority were of the type known as Cockspurs, consisting of three small holes in the end of a pipe. Murdock made many further improvements, but in this endeavour he was quickly overtaken by Samuel Clegg, an ex-employee of Boulton and Watt, who in 1805 left the firm and began to install gas in factories at about the same period as Murdock.
His first important improvement was the purification of the gas by liming the water through which it passed, and in 1810 (at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire) he brought in a separate liming machine.
He also invented the hydraulic main, and installed gas into the premises of Rudolph Ackermann, the famous London art-publisher. In 1812 Clegg was invited by the German chemist Winsor* to join the new Gas Light & Coke Company, the first real public utility, which was soon producing coal-gas as a part of the coking process in large central generating plants and distributing it through underground pipes to individual users.
In April 1814 the London parish of St. Margaret's in Westminster was lit by gas, and by December 1816 London had 26 miles of gas mains, and soon many major cities had gasworks and distribution networks. Although the supply cost of gas was only one-third, or even one-quarter, the cost of oil, gas remained too expensive to use for heating or cooking, and it also contained many impurities that produced undesirable products of combustion (particularly carbon soot) in occupied spaces.
The early gas lamps made by Murdock and others made use of a simple burner in which the yellow light of the flame itself was the source of the illumination. But during the 1820s a new form of burner - known as either the fish-tail or swallow-tail burner, invented by Neilson*, chief engineer and manager of the Glasgow gasworks from 1817 to 1847 - was introduced, in which two jets of gas came together.
By the 1820s and 1830s gas was being used for illumination in England, Europe and America for streets, public buildings, shops, churches, offices, schools, theatres and clubs, but there were problems with the blackened ceilings and fumes.
It was not until after 1855, with Bunsen's* invention of the atmospheric burner, that gas could be used comfortably within small spaces. In Bunsen's atmospheric burner, a controlled amount of air was admitted to the gas current, producing a high-temperature but non-luminous flame that heated a non-combustible material to a very high temperature.
This then became the source of light, and the higher the temperature of the material, the whiter the colour of the light and the greater the output.
By the 1880s, a woven network of cotton threads impregnated with thorium and cerium salts - invented by the Austrian Welsbach* - had become the standard light-emitting material used in gas lamps, and the yellow gas flare which heated the air, blackened the ceilings, and gave only a moderate degree of illumination for a great expenditure of gas gave way to the incandescent gas-mantle.
The development of the electric lamp at the turn of the 19th century stopped the trend toward gas lamps, and by 1911 the conversion of gas fixtures for use with electricity had begun. Soon electricity was rapidly replacing gas for general illuminating purposes, although in England and Europe gas enjoyed wide use for a number of years longer.
ONELINER: Gaslight
OTHER CONNECTIONS:
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.[35]
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."[41]
These problems with gas lighting led to the rapid adoption of electric lighting. By 1881, the Savoy Theatre in London was using incandescent lighting.[47] 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."[48] Electric lighting slowly took over in theatres. In the 20th century, it enabled better and safer theater 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 1 mile (1.6 km) of the lamps. This voltage drop problem made DC distribution relatively expensive and gas lighting retained widespread usage[49] 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.[49]
Gaslighting historically referred to extreme psychological manipulation to commit an individual to a psychiatric institution or cause mental illness with the intent to brainwash.[1][2] In contemporary language, gaslighting is a colloquialism describing the subjective experience of having one's reality repeatedly questioned by another.
Merriam Webster cites deception of one's memory, perception of reality, or mental stability.[4] This term, derived from the 1944 American film Gaslight, entered colloquial English usage in the mid-2010s. Not coincidentally, The Washington Post counted President Donald Trump told 30,573 false or misleading statements over 4 years. Moreover, when journalists did their job and exposed the lies, he ironically labelled them “Fake News” and “enemy of the people, ” particularly on social media, which has largely abandoned any effort to limit disinformation, boosted by its algorithms for profit. Moreover, corporate dark money, especially from energy corporations, have caused allied Republicans to amplify Trump’s climate denial, in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus and daily headlines. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox corporation have been major propagators of climate, covid and election denial, costing millions of lives and endangering democracy by endlessly and knowingly repeating lies.
Etymology
Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten in the film Gaslight (1944)
The origin of the term is the 1938 British thriller play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton, which provided the source material for the 1940 British film, Gaslight. The film was then remade in 1944 in America – also as Gaslight – and it is this film which has since become the primary reference point for the term...
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB
Derry, T.K and T.I. Williams, A Short History of Technology, From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900, New York: Dover Publications, 1958
Singer, Charles etc., A History of Technology, Vol IV: The Industrial Revolution, c. 1750-c.1850, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.