GAS LIGHTING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 June 1942, Page 4

GAS LIGHTING

EARLY BRITISH EXPERIENCE. Crowds gathered in Pall Mall, London, on February 6, 1807, to see the “first street in the world lit by coalgas.” Fifteen years earlier William Murdoch had lighted his cottage at Redruth with gas, but the London experiment was left to the enterprise of a company promoter named Winsor, or Winser, who in 1806 had created a sensation by illuminating the front of Carlton House, home of the Prince Regent, by gas lamps. Having falsified the gibe of Sir Humphry Davy that it would be as easy to bring down a piece of the moon to light London as to do it with coal-gas, Winsor tried to form a “New Patriotic, Imperial, and National Light and Heat Company, the profits of which he modestly estimated at £229,000,000 per annum, out of which he proposed to pay shareholders 1,000 per cent and apply the balance to redeeming the National Debt. The fantastic project fizzled out, as might have been expected, but later Winsor laid the foundations of a great gas and coke company which still functions.—“ Manchester Guardian.”