Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [29]
Manufacturers insisted that the smell of gas was good for one's health, but court testimony proved otherwise: "Mr. Arabin, deposed, that he was an upholsterer, residing ... about two hundred yards from the building belonging to the Gaslight Company.... He observed something daily issuing from the establishment exceedingly offensive: it was a kind of smoke producing a saline effluvia, which operated upon his senses, and considerably affected his respiration: the smell was of a sour and acrid nature." According to another witness, "When the effluvia was abroad, he could not open his windows.... His own lungs were hurt, and there was a certain nausea produced upon the stomach. A taste was also continually in his mouth, like sulphureous acid. There was an immense quantity of smoke proceeding from excessive large fires, and when these appeared to be at work, he was compelled to close up his doors and windows." The testimony of a third witness echoed the sentiments of the other two: "Thomas Edgely is a coal-merchant, and has a wharf adjoining the gas light manufactory, and from which there is a constant stench.... Never remembers to smell anything so offensive in his life; even the coal-heavers complain and are sickened by it. Believes it is no easy matter 'to turn a coal heaver's stomach.'"
Fear of gasometer explosions became part of the anxiety of the age. The Times of London suggested that "at present it is clear every gasometer is a powder-magazine, and to have a gas manufactory near Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, or one of the bridges, is much the same as if we were to store our gunpowder on the Thames Embankment." The fear wasn't allayed over time, for the gasometers would only become more prominent and increase in size as the century progressed. Within the works, men—dwarfed by the furnaces and in the flare of fire—shoveled coal into the retorts. We can see them there in a moment of respite in Gustave Doré's 1872 wood engraving Lambeth Gas Works: clustered, exhausted, dressed in rags. Behind them, the even courses of the brick walls, the arch with its keystone—twice the height of the men—and the gas pipes remain unassailably solid, as do the men in the far distance working the furnaces: stiff-backed, stiff-armed, disciplined, stoking the fires in mechanical unison, seeming to be part of the machine. The men at rest aren't sheltered by the immensity—they are dominated by it, and in the uncoordinated moment of their exhaustion, with their shoulders hunched, their ragged clothes draped over them, they find no relief in not being part of the machine: they have been defeated by it.
For all its complexities, gaslight proved to be a remarkable success in London, and that success led to its rapid establishment in other British cities and towns. Historian Stephen Goldfarb notes: "In 1821 no town in the United Kingdom with a population of more than 50,000 was without a gas company; by 1826 only a few towns over 10,000 lacked gas companies; and by mid-century a 'vast majority of towns with a population greater than 2,500 possessed gas companies.'" Across continental Europe and in America, where economies were still based on wood, gaslight appeared later, progressed more slowly, and remained largely an urban system. "Paris was illuminated in 1814 by 5,000 [oil] street lamps, serviced by 142 lamplighters.... In 1826 there were 9,000 gas burners in Paris; in 1828 there were 10,000." In the United States, Baltimore was the first city to adopt limited gas lighting, in 1817. Philadelphia and New York experimented with gaslight at the same time, but it failed to take hold, in part because of opposition from tallow manufacturers. New York's first gaslights appeared in 1825, Philadelphia's in the 1830s.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in praise of gaslight:
The work of Prometheus had advanced another stride. Mankind and its supper parties were no