Brilliant (8 page)

All factories ... used considerable quantities of oil and tallow in winter months. In 1806, one of the largest of Manchester's spinning factories, McConnel & Kennedy, burned candles for at least eight hours on the shortest days and averaged four hours lighting a day for six months of the year.... The annual cost of lighting McConnel & Kennedy's factory in 1806 was about £750. This firm burned an average 1,500 candles each night for 25 weeks in the year and consumed more than 15,000 lbs. of tallow.

William Murdoch, chief engineer at Boulton and Watt—one of most prominent firms in England and builder of the first steam locomotive—experimented with coal gas at the same time Lebon was developing his thermolampe. Although others were also considering how to use coal gas, Murdoch achieved the first real success. His system differed from Lebon's only in its scale: he fitted retorts with pipes that carried distilled gas to huge reservoirs or storage tanks, called gasometers, and fitted the gasometers with outflow pipes, which could send gas, when needed, through mains and then smaller pipes to outlets.

Murdoch lit his own cottage for his initial experiment, and then in 1802 he built a larger system for Boulton and Watt's forge in their Soho, Birmingham, factory. Its success led him to expand the system to include the workshops in Soho. In 1805 he began construction of a gaslight system for the Phillips & Lee cotton mill in Manchester, which he completed several years later:

It was estimated that more than 900 burners produced light equivalent to 2500 tallow candles burning on average for 2 hours on each working day. The factory contained eleven gasometers, six retorts, and more than two miles of pipes. Total expenditure on the plant was in excess of £5000, the cost of gas was about £600, allowing for depreciation of the equipment and the sale of the coke manufactured as a by-product.... The equivalent light produced by tallow candles would have cost an estimated £2000 a year.

These very first gaslight systems probably didn't significantly improve the quality of light in the workrooms. Most observers of the time claimed that one gas burner gave a light three to six times brighter than a common oil lamp, but they had no accurate way of measuring the difference, only a comparison of shadows, which at the time was explained this way:

Suppose it were required to know how many candles, of a given size, were equal to a patent [Argand] lamp:—place the lamp at one end of the mantle-piece
[sic],
and the candles at the other; hold up the snuffer-tray, a book, or any other object of which the shadow can be received on a sheet of white paper against the opposite wall; the object must be held in a line with the middle of the mantelpiece: the lamp will produce one shadow and the candles another; when the shadows are equally dark the lights are equal; the darkest shadow will be produced by the strongest light.

To its advantage, a gas flame could be larger than an oil lamp's because it wasn't restricted by the size of the wick, and under ideal circumstances coal gas's combustion was almost complete: it burned with a whiter, clearer flame (in contrast to the reddish orange glow of most simple oil lamps and candles). Yet in the beginning, gaslight was far from perfect. There were few filters for the coal gas, which contained both hydrogen sulfide and carbonic acid, so a foul smell accompanied the light. (Although Murdoch's system for Phillips & Lee filtered the gas through lime, which absorbed the hydrogen sulfide and carbonic acid, this did not entirely purify it.) The gas itself was of uneven quality, its delivery was unreliable, and the equipment was crude. As William O'Dea notes, "The burners were simply iron tubes with holes pierced in them; and apart from the variable and often poor illuminating quality of [the] gas produced ... the burners quickly corroded and, even when new, over-cooled the flame." Still, the jets didn't require individual attention, and there was nothing to spill or tip. And although gas left a sooty residue, it was cleaner, too.

If gaslight was cleaner, the grime of getting the coal to produce it rivaled that of the hunt for whale oil, as a descent into any British coal mine in the early 1800s would attest. According to a writer of the time,

Clean and orderly [the miners] coolley
[sic]
precipitate themselves into a black, smoking, and bottomless-looking crater, where you would think it almost impossible human lungs could play, or blood dance through the heart. At nearly the same moment you see others coming up, as jetty as the object of the search, drenched and tired. I have stood in a dark night, near the mouth of a pit, lighted by a suspended grate, filled with flaring coals ... the pit emitting a smoke as dense as the chimney of a steam-engine; the men, with their sooty and grimy faces ... their sparkling eyes.

Except for that suspended grate at the mouth of the shaft, pitmen would have had almost nothing to see by. They used their candles sparingly, since methane gas—known as firedamp and present in many mines—could be ignited by an open flame. Still, they needed some illumination, both to extract coal and to check on their surroundings in order to spot structural weaknesses in the shafts, so they risked candlelight after an overman checked the workings for gas. First, the overman lit a trimmed and clean candle on the floor and placed his palm in front of it so that he saw only the spire of the flame. Then he raised the candle slowly toward the ceiling of the mine, where firedamp—lighter than air—collected. If it was present, the tip of the flame would turn blue. "This spire increases in size and receives a deeper tinge of blue, as it rises through an increased proportion of inflammable gas, till it reaches the firing point," explained an account of the time. "But the experienced collier knows accurately enough all the varieties of
shew
(as it is called) upon the candle, and it is very rarely fired upon, excepting in cases of sudden discharges of inflammable gas."

In the best circumstances, when the overman found firedamp, he left the mine and then—so as to make it safer for work—ignited the gas by lowering a lighted candle or coal-filled iron basket down the shaft. But if he detected firedamp far inside the workings, he had no choice but to send down a man to ignite it: "Clad from head to foot in rags soaked in water, [the man] would crawl along the underground way holding in front of him a long pole at the end of which was a lighted candle. When the explosion occurred he would fling himself, face downward, on the floor, and so, with good fortune, he might escape the flame which shot along the roof above him." The man was sometimes called a penitent.

In spite of such efforts, miners thought of explosions, and the human injuries and deaths that accompanied them, as inevitable. The history of the mines is also the history of the dead, the burned, and the injured. As one account attests, "Everything in the way of the blast was thrown out at the mouth to the estimated height of 200 yards in the air. Most of the pitmen, having just in time discovered the danger, were drawn up, and escaped unhurt; but some boys, and one man, who were left behind, lost their lives." Another account tells of four men who

were about three hundred yards from the shaft, when the foul air took fire. In a moment it tore the wall from end to end; and burning on till it came to the shaft, it then burst and went off like a large cannon. The men instantly fell on their faces, or they would have been burned to death in a few moments. One of them, who once knew the love of God (Andrew English), began crying aloud for mercy; but in a very short time his breath was stopped. The other three crept on their hands and knees, till two got to the shaft and were drawn up; but one of them died in a few minutes. John M'Combe was drawn up next, burned from head to foot but rejoicing and praising God. They then went down for Andrew; whom they found senseless: the very circumstance which saved his life. For losing his senses, he lay flat on the ground, and the greatest part of the fire went over him.

Miners and mine owners were always looking for alternatives to candles. Although miners' candles were exceedingly small—up to sixty to the pound, for it was believed a small candle might prevent the ignition of firedamp—everything thought of as a substitute for them provided less light than even those slim solitary tapers. It's almost inconceivable now to imagine how slight and shifting was the illumination miners worked by so far below the earth's surface. One device, a flint mill, required boys to accompany the miners down the shafts. Each boy worked a mill, which might be strapped to his leg or hung from his neck. It was made of a steel disk set in a small steel frame and a handle attached to a spur wheel, which turned the disk. The boy held a piece of flint against the disk as he rotated it so as to produce streams of sparks for the miner to work by. The sparks were usually too cool to set off the gas, but not always.

And if miners couldn't use even a mill, they had little else to rely on for illumination. When a flint mill at the Wallsend Colliery caused an explosion that killed nine miners, "work was continued in the shaft without it and with the greatest difficulty. For some time it was performed in total darkness, aided only by light reflected from the surface by means of a mirror during periods of sunshine." Perhaps the strangest form of light was used in the Tyne mines, known to be "gassy" or "fiery." There colliers "sometimes tried to carry on their work by the feeble light of phosphorous and putrescent fish."

The first practical miners' safety lamps were developed around 1815, and the one devised by Sir Humphry Davy, later head of the Royal Society in London, proved to be the most popular. Davy enclosed a flame within a wire mesh cylinder, which distributed the fire's heat and prevented the air beyond the lamp from reaching the ignition temperature of firedamp. Although his lamp was quickly put into wide use, it didn't slow the number of mine deaths. Because of the mesh, the Davy lamp shed only about one-sixth the light of a common taper, so miners often continued to work by candlelight as well. The use of safety lamps also encouraged men to work deeper in the mines and open up more fiery seams. As a result, the mines became even more dangerous. The inventors of safety lamps, one mining historian suggests, "had provided the miner with a weapon of defense: armed with it he was led forward to meet fresh perils. They had sought to bring security of life: they achieved an increase in the output of coal."

By the time Davy developed his safety lamp, an increase in the output of coal had become essential. Not only was the Industrial Revolution speeding up, but coal gas possessed an increasing value. In addition to illuminating the workrooms in factories, gas was illuminating streets and shops and homes in the city of London. Bringing gaslight beyond the factories had required the sustained effort of its promoters, who had to overcome opposition from whale oil and tallow interests and the skepticism of some prominent scientists. Sir Humphry Davy himself thought the idea so absurd that he asked "if it were intended to take the dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer." Five years after Murdoch successfully lit the Soho forge, gas streetlamps made their first modest appearance. In 1807 a section of Pall Mall was outfitted with lamps to celebrate the king's birthday. It would be another five years before German immigrant and entrepreneur Frederick Albert Winsor (born Friedrich Albrecht Winzer) established the world's first gas lighting company, the Chartered Gas Light and Coke Company in London.

Winsor knew of Lebon's thermolampe and envisioned the home system writ large for an entire neighborhood. As Wolfgang Schivelbush notes, "Winsor was not the original inventor of gas lighting.... But he established the concept that allowed gas lighting to make the transition from individual to general use: the idea of supplying consumers of gas from a central production site by means of gas mains." Winsor's company, with its single gasometer, delivered gas for street lighting, commercial establishments, and wealthy homeowners in Westminster, Southwark, and the surroundings, including Westminster Bridge. Its brilliance and relative cleanliness was immediately apparent and appealing. Gaslight, it was claimed, shed "a brightness clear as summer's noon, but undazzling and soft as moonlight.... Those who have been used only to the brilliancy of oil and candle-light, can have no adequate idea of the effect of an illumination by gas. It so completely penetrates the whole atmosphere, and at the same time is so genial to the eyesight, that it appears as natural and pure as daylight, and it sheds also a warmth as purifying to the air as cheering to the spirits."

Once established, gaslight spread quickly throughout London. By the early 1820s, nearly fifty gasometers and several hundred miles of underground gas mains supplied more than forty thousand public gas lamps for the streets. The lamplighters made their rounds with relative ease, using a lighted oil lamp on the end of a pole. "I foresee in this ... the breaking up of our profession," a lamplighter in a Charles Dickens story would soon proclaim. "No more polishing of the tin reflectors^]...no more fancy-work, in the way of clipping the cottons at two o'clock in the morning; no more going the rounds to trim by daylight, and dribbling down of the
ile
on the hats and bonnets of the ladies and gentlemen, when one feels in good spirits. Any low fellow can light a gas-lamp, and it's all up!"

In the intimate spaces of home, this strange new light may not have required the same daily attention as did oil lamps and candles, but it had its drawbacks. Its larger flame produced considerable soot and an acid residue that destroyed fabric and wallpaper, and it consumed so much oxygen that people suffered headaches in poorly ventilated rooms, although as time went on, gas chandeliers eventually contained their own ventilation systems. But perhaps more important, with the advent of gaslight people had to reimagine how light would inhabit their homes. Light's abstract future had begun: there was nothing to tend, no wick to see consumed, no melting wax or reservoirs of oil drawing down. The size of the flame could be controlled by a switch and did not waver, flicker, or gutter. It not only stood upright but shot out of the core sideways or upside down, in the shape of a fish tail, a bat wing, or a fan. It was not to be doused with water or extinguished with breath. Fire itself seemed to travel through the pipes. "It was strangely believed that the pipes conveying the gas must be hot!" exclaimed engineer Samuel Clegg. "When the passages to the House of Commons were lighted, the architect insisted upon the pipes being placed four or five inches from the wall, for fear of fire, and the curious would apply the gloved hand to the pipe to ascertain the temperature."