Fredrick Accum

Description Of The Process Of Manufacturing Fredrick Accum

The extraordinarily rapid progress which the recent invention of lighting with coal gas has made in this country, is perhaps without a parallel in the history of the useful arts. It was an invention not exempted from the misfortune common to all innovations on established practises, of encountering opposition, but it had the fortune common to few, of obtaining an almost instantaneous triumph. A single exhibition of the gas lights in actual use was sufficient to determine the public judgment in favour of the new mode of illumination; to see was in this case, indeed to believe. The legislature responsive to the popular voice, and fortified in its responsibility, by the results of special enquiries which were ordered to be made into the merits of the invention, and in which I had the good fortune to be professionally engaged, gave the most liberal and decided encouragement to its adoption. Capital, often wanting even in this opulent country for undertakings of magnitude, came to the promotion of the new art of procuring and distributing light in overflowing abundance; and already ere many years are elapsed, such has been the rapidity with which the gas light illumination has advanced, that there is not a city and scarcely a town of any note in Great Britain, in which the art of lighting by means of gas, has not been carried into effect, or in which active measures are not in progress, to participate in the benefit of this important discovery. When the art was yet in its infancy, I published a Treatise, containing a description of the apparatus and machinery best calculated for illuminating streets, houses, and public buildings, by means of coal gas, with remarks on the utility, safety, and general nature of this new branch of domestic economy, as far as then understood, and practised in the metropolis.