Today's selection -- from American Lucifers by Jeremy Zallen. Long before Thomas Edison and the electric lightbulb, American cities were lit by gas derived from coal, and gaslight companies proliferated as cities clamored for this new source of illumination:The soon-to-be front month June futures settle at $1.874 down 0.068 on the day and down something on the order of 99.8% in real terms since SciAm was commenting and pointing up one of the main reasons commodities are for tradin' not 'vestin'.
"To manufacture gas from coal, stokers shoveled it into clay ovens called retorts; workers tending furnaces superheated the retorts until the coal decomposed into hydrogen gas, other gasses, and the nearly pure carbon remains known as coke; and then condensers and scrubbers purified and collected that hydrogen gas in giant tanks to pipe throughout a city. Gas was the unquestioned light of an industrially enlightened future. First developed in Britain in the early nineteenth century, by the 1840s European and American cities were enthusiastically adopting the technology. All over the United States, from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to New Orleans, Baltimore, Richmond, and even whale-crazed New Bedford, gasworks were sprouting up, expanding, and thriving in cities still overwhelmingly illuminated with camphene, oil, and candles.
"One of the most insistent proponents of gas was the New York publication Scientific American. For writers in Scientific American, gas was, or should have been, an agent of democracy, equality, and freedom. Complaining of what they perceived to be unfairly high gas rates in 1852, they argued that if 'gas was $2 per 1000 feet,' as it was in Philadelphia, instead of the $3 it was in New York, 'all our working people would use it, and it would prove a blessing to them....MORE
Saturday, April 25, 2020
The Light Just Before Electricity
From the internet's tiny treasure, Delancey Place:
