The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Turning Night Into Day

This man's name was William Murdock. He is the same Murdock who built the first steam engine in England. Murdock was a workingman at first, and later an engineer in the factory belonging to Boulton and Watt. This was the first locomotive works.

In this famous factory Murdock built his gas plant, and it was not an easy thing to do. He knew that in order to get a combustible gas he had to heat his coal white hot. But if coal is white hot it will burn up and there will be no gas. How could he get out of this dilemma?

Murdock's solution was a simple one: instead of heating the coal in an open furnace he used a closed one, a "retort", into which no air could penetrate.

Combustible gas does not burn without air and it could thus be piped to any place desired.

But there was still another difficulty. Gas isn't the only thing obtained from coal when it is burned. There are also soot and water vapor. As the gas comes out of the retort it cools and these vapors liquefy. Now, if the gas were allowed to pass through the pipes in this form these liquids would quickly settle in them and clog them up. To prevent this the soot and water are very carefully separated out at the plant. The gas is cooled by passing it through a series of perpendicular pipes, cooled on the outside by air or water. In this cooler the water vapor and soot condense and settle to the bottom, the gas goes on through the pipes to the burners.

At the same time that Murdock was carrying on his experiments with gas lighting a Frenchman named Lebon was doing the same thing. In 1811, in a journal entitled Magazine of All the Newest Inventions, Discoveries and Improvements, there appears the following notice:

M. Lebon has shown that a pleasant heat and a very brilliant light can be obtained by carefully collecting smoke and burning it. The inventor gave a demonstration of his invention and seven rooms and a garden were successfully lighted up with this new light. The inventor calls his apparatus a "thermo-lamp," that is a "heat-light."

It wasn't nearly so hard to think up a good gas burner as it had been to think up a lamp. All that was necessary was to put a little cap on the end of the gas pipe, with a slit in it to let the gas out, and it gave a brilliant flame. Later the principle of the Argand lamp was used here too. In the Argand gas burner there are many little openings arranged in a circle, to permit the air to reach the center of the burner.

And, as in a kerosene lamp, a glass chimney is placed over the burner.