Holló Szilvia Andrea: Budapest's Public Works - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

From gashouse to natural gas mains

measuring and purifying gas. Archibald Cochrane (the abovementioned Lord Archibald) patented the oven for destructive distillation. Now the ground was prepared for the launching of industrial-scale manufacture, which can be attributed to Frederick Albert Winsor, an anglicised German. He was the first to establish a gas company after he installed a pipe system to distribute the gas he produced from a central plant.

As the new illuminating fuel could now be safely handled and transported outdoors, the first gas lights were lit on the streets of London. The innovation took the large cities of the Continent by storm, and the shopping arcades of Paris were soon awash in light. Oil-fuelled street lamps had had their day, and in the first half of the 19th century privately-founded gas companies popped up one after the other from Paris to Vienna.

News of the invention reached Pest, an oil-wicker lit city at the time, too, and the novelty was given, in the heady atmosphere of language reform, the high-sounding name légázeóz, i.e. "airy spirit". As the story goes, this novelty was introduced, among many others, by István Széchenyi to Hungary. On his visit to England in the winter of 1815, the count paid a considerable sum for a gas generator, which he brought adventurously home to set it up in his Nagycenk mansion. What is a fact, though, is that, regardless of a few isolated experiments, the first significant advances with the deployment of illumination gas in Hungary were made by Lajos Tehel, when he lit,

■ Gaó lamp on ihow in the itreet (György Klösz)

9