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

From gashouse to natural gas mains

dustrial equipment was imported from England. Originally, a modern-looking plant was envisaged to stand on the edge of Joseph Town (Józsefváros), but a conventional design found easier acceptance with the residents who were suspicious of industrial innovation, and thus plans for Neo-Romantic factory buildings were drawn up by Ágoston Pollack.

After the buildings were opened, the manufacture of illumination gas made from Czech coal commenced with 150 workers under the technological supervision of Ludwig Stefany. Coal was shovelled manually into the distilling retorts. The daily amount of 300-350 cubic metres of gas was distilled from one ton of coal. In time, six storage units were built on the site of the plant: the smallest of these held 1,500, the largest 16,000 cubic metres of gas. As no use was found for the by-products of tar and coke, these were dumped into large pits dug outside the gashouse.

Hardly had the works producing illumination gas started its long-awaited operation at 6 p.m. on 23 December 1856, the end product was submitted to biting criticism in the pages of Pesti Nap ló (Pest Diary): "Street lighting has at last arrived... The introduction of this new blessing highlights the truth oh the old maxim that every beginning is di^icult. Rather than being applauded by enthusiastic crowds as most other advances we can thank to human ingenuity are, this particular innovation remains the object of derision and disdain to this day. What was given to the public to experience the night before last was that albeit pedestrians might not actually stumble into one another in the dark, there remained a su^icient amount of dusk to give benevolent cover to debtors hiding from their creditors."

The first gas lamps were set up on Kerepesi (today's Rákóczi) út and the streets of the Inner City; the gas works supplied illumination gas for 838 street lights and to 9,148 private customers — the latter were catered for in a smart shop selling gas lights in the downtown hotel named for The Queen of England. The top-hatted lamplighter became a peculiar character of Hungary’s capital, a figure who went from street to street on his rounds to reach up with his long staff to the lamps on their posts to light and then to extinguish them or, in the daytime, to polish the lamp- houses from atop his ladder. As many as 162 municipal employees did this job in Pest and another 43 in Buda.

The old Town House of Pest was the first public building to be connected to the gas mains; the municipal building was then followed by the Dohány utca synagogue, the second addition to the emerging system, and from the early sixties on, carriages servicing the lines of the western railways were also lit by gas. As initial difficulties were overcome, gas used for internal illumination was discovered by the magnates of the

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