History of manufactured fuel gases

The history of gaseous fuel, important for lighting, heating, and cooking purposes throughout most of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, began with the development of analytical and pneumatic chemistry in the 18th century. These "synthetic fuel gases" (also known as "manufactured fuel gas", "manufactured gas" or simply "gas") were made by gasification of combustible materials, usually coal, but also wood and oil, by heating them in enclosed ovens with an oxygen-poor atmosphere. The fuel gases generated were mixtures of many chemical substances, including hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and ethylene. Coal gas also contains significant quantities of unwanted sulfur and ammonia compounds, as well as heavy hydrocarbons, and must be purified before use.

The first attempts to manufacture fuel gas in a commercial way were made in the period 1795–1805 in France by Philippe LeBon, and in England by William Murdoch. Although precursors can be found, it was these two engineers who elaborated the technology with commercial applications in mind. Frederick Winsor was the key player behind the creation of the first gas utility, the London-based Gas Light and Coke Company, incorporated by royal charter in April 1812.

Manufactured gas utilities were founded first in England, and then in the rest of Europe and North America in the 1820s. The technology increased in scale. After a period of competition, the business model of the gas industry matured in monopolies, where a single company provided gas in a given zone. The ownership of the companies varied from outright municipal ownership, such as in Manchester, to completely private corporations, such as in London and most North American cities. Gas companies thrived during most of the nineteenth century, usually returning good profits to their shareholders, but were also the subject of many complaints over price.

The most important use of manufactured gas in the early 19th century was for gas lighting, as a convenient substitute for candles and oil lamps in the home. Gas lighting became the first widespread form of street lighting. For this use, gases that burned with a highly luminous flame, "illuminating gases", were needed, in contrast to other uses (e.g. as fuel) where the heat output was the main consideration. Accordingly, some gas mixtures of low intrinsic luminosity, such as blue water gas, were enriched with oil to make them more suitable for street lighting.

In the second half of the 19th century, the manufactured fuel gas industry diversified from lighting to include heat and cooking uses. The threat from electrical light in the later 1870s and 1880s drove this trend strongly. The gas industry did not cede the gas lighting market to electricity immediately, as the invention of the Welsbach mantle, a refractory mesh bag heated to incandescence by a mostly non-luminous flame within, dramatically increased the efficiency of gas lighting. Acetylene was also used from about 1898 for gas cooking and gas lighting (see Carbide lamp) on a smaller scale, although its use too declined with the advent of electric lighting, and LPG for cooking.^[1] Other technological developments in the late nineteenth century include the use of water gas and machine stoking, although these were not universally adopted.

In the 1890s, pipelines from natural gas fields in Texas and Oklahoma were built to Chicago and other cities, and natural gas was used to supplement manufactured fuel gas supplies, eventually completely displacing it. Gas ceased to be manufactured in North America by 1966 (with the exception of Indianapolis and Honolulu), while it continued in Europe until the 1980s. "Manufactured gas" is again being evaluated as a fuel source, as energy utilities look towards coal gasification once again as a potentially cleaner way of generating power from coal, although nowadays such gases are likely to be called "synthetic natural gas".