BUYING GAS IN PENN’ORTHS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1290, 19 November 1896, Page 9

BUYING GAS IN PENN’ORTHS.

.£125,0C0 PER ANNUM IN PENNIES.

The nimble,penny is every year exercising a more potent influence in making life livable. There is no more remarkable illustration of the fact than the history of the penny-in-the-slot gas business affoids. A year or two ago the London working-man had to put up with oil lamps and coal fires. Now he cooks his early breakfast on a gas stove, and reads bis evening paper by an incandescent burner, the open sesame to both these advantages being ever the same old copper. Mr Livesey, the engineer of the South London Gas Company, has been telling a Star turn some remarkable facts about the revolution wrought by the slot machine on the Surrey side. In less than four years this company alone has fixed 50,000 slot meters and 37,40 S small cooking stoves. TIIE PRICE OF OA3. Actually half the houses occupied by arti-san.-—an enormous proportion, which is every week being increased—are now fitted with gas, for which the company charge at the rate of Id per 27ft. This is 3s Id. per 1000. The rate to ordinary consumers is only 2s 3d. The difference of lOd is charged for rent of pipes, fittings, meter, and stove, which cost about £0 per house, and which the ordinary consumer has to provide for hitnself. The margin seems large, and Mr Livesey says it will be reduced if the result of the company’s working shows that it is too high. In the Midlands and Scotland working-class houses are built with the gasfiltings in. London builders have hitherto regarded them as “extras.” So the company has to put them in. The average consumption of gas supplied through a slot machine for illuminating purposes is 12,000 ft per annum. With a cooking-stove, which costs the company 2Gs, it rises to 19,000. The consumption is largest in summer, when people do not trouble to light a fire at all. It is larg st of all on Sundays, between 11 aim. and 2 p m., when practically every consumer ia •'ooking his Sunday dinner. TRICKS THAT A VAIN. People play some funny tricks with the meters. Any' metal disc the size of a penny will work the oracle. And if the consumer replaces them with pennies when the collector comes round, no complaint is made. A dishonest consumer’s only benefit arises when he contemplates a moonlight flitting. He can then rob tbe meter to his heart’s content, so long as he quits before the collector comes. At first French pennies would operate the mechanism. Now it rejects them with mechanical scorn. A trick which worked for a time consisted in perforating a penny and dropping it into the slot at the end of a piece of string, by which it could be withdrawn. Now there is a knife-blade in the mechanism which cuts the Btring, leaving the loop on the penny to tell tales to the collector. the soaped penny. At first you could make a penny stick in the mechanism by soaping it, and get unlimited gas. But that no longer works, and in fcany case the meter records the whole amount used, and you have to settle up with the collector. Occasionally a consumer comes to the office in great grief to say that a half-crown has been put in by mistake. It is given back in exchange for a penny. And sometimes tbe collectors find florins in the machine, which have been dropped in for pennies in the dark, and have never been missed. The consumer loses nothing by it, but on the contrary has been betrayed into involuntary thrift. In Woolwich, where the Co-operative Society issues metal tokens, a meter is sometimes found to be full of them. Then the consumer has long arrears to pull up. In the early days dishonest persons went from house to house pretending to be collectors, and clearing the meters. They are now doing time, and the trick won’t work when it is known. MORE COPPERS NEEDED. Slot meters have made it necessary to increase the coinage of copper. It is calculated that there are £7OOO worth of coppers in the South London Company’s meters all the time. £2400 worth are taken out every week. They w.-igh between five and six tons. A man counting 135 coppers every minute would take two months, three weeks, four and a half days to compute half a year’s pennies. At first it was difficult to get rid of this vast mass of copper money. The difficulty has partly rectified itself, for the large sums withdrawn from circulation make it easier to return large sums into circulation. But special terms have had to be made with one of the banks to induce it to receive the coppers, which the collectors pay in as fast as they clear the machines. Every meter is cleared once in five or six weeks. The bad debts are no more than among ordinary consumers.