William Murdoch lit his walk home with a bladder full of coal gas
Before gas lit whole cities, the Scottish engineer William Murdoch carried a lantern made from a gas-filled bladder attached to a jet, and used it to find his way home at night. It worked so well that in 1797 he piped gas lighting into his house and workshop, laying the groundwork for an industry.
Coal gas had been a curiosity for more than a century. Miners knew seeping gases mainly as killers, calling them choke damp and fire damp, and a 1667 paper described gas escaping from a Lancashire coal pit that could be set alight at a nearby spring. The clergyman John Clayton discovered coal gas burned when a leak from a cracked distilling vessel met a candle; he stored it in bladders to amuse friends. Stephen Hales distilled coal in experiments published in 1726, and in 1733 Sir James Lowther showed the Royal Society that gas his miners had struck stayed flammable after days in a bladder. Nobody yet saw a use for it.
Streets had been lit by other means for centuries. London's Lord Mayor ordered lanterns hung out on winter evenings in 1417, Paris issued its first lighting order in 1524, and a 1716 London rule fined householders a shilling for failing to show a light from six to eleven on dark nights. Lamps burned olive oil, beeswax, fish or whale oil. Far earlier, Chinese homes had used natural gas carried through bamboo pipes, according to records 1,700 years old.
After Murdoch's demonstrations, gas spread through European and North American cities in the 19th century, lighting streets, homes, factories and theatres. On stage it allowed brighter, centrally controlled lighting, though at the cost of heat, fire and explosions.
Electric light pushed it aside from the late 19th century as power grids improved. Yet gas lamps survive in historic districts, and Berlin keeps the largest network of gas street lamps in the world.
Source: Gas lighting
