While Progressive Enlightenment deals with a narrow historical period, it maintains a wide intellectual range. He shows that the development of gas in the early 19th century was crucial to key sectors of the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain during the late 18th century. Leslie Tomory is intent on overturning this lamentable state of affairs. And if literary historians took notice, it was only to explore its use as a favored means of suicide. The pioneers, technologies, and manufacturers of coal gas have attracted little interest its competition with electricity has been virtually ignored. Few historians of technology have noticed the depth of its significance or have charted its development, in contrast to the attention they’ve paid to steam power. By the end of the century it was so ubiquitous that the substance itself was considered banal. Unlike today’s “natural gas,” which is mostly methane, coal gas was a complex mix of compounds and elements that included methane and ethylene, hydrogen and nitrogen, poisonous carbon monoxide, and odiferous hydrogen sulfide-which gave the gas its characteristic smell.Ĭoal gas was used for lighting, heating, and cooking from the early 19th century, first in Britain, then in the rest of Europe and in North America. After all, tar was the basis of the organic chemical industry, coke fueled furnaces and was a staple of the steel industry, and liquor was the basis of fertilizers. The conversion into the fourfold outputs of coke, gas, tar, and “ammoniacal liquor” symbolized the utility of their science. To chemists of the past the distillation of coal in the absence of air was among the most critical of all processes. Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, 1780–1820.

Gaslight liquor