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

From gashouse to natural gas mains

(today’s Hunyadi János) út and the Castle District were met with gas delivered via tubing affixed to the bridge until 1866 when a new gashouse was built at the junction of Margit körút and Kisrókus utca. Although most city councillors found the empty region of Gellért Hill or the City Manor (Városmajor) area, the gas works company intended to expand in the direction of Óbuda, which is why its management settled on a nearby site.

Lighting gas consumption was above 1.5 million cubic metres in the first year already, and by the time of Budapest’s unification in 1872—73 it had reached the annual amount of 4.5 million. After unification, city councillors began to speak more and more of how the time was ripe for the municipality to take care of lighting gas manufacture and build a communally- owned gas works with a production capacity of 8 million cubic metres. That, however, took another three decades to accomplish. Having considered several offers, the city signed another deal with the General Austrian Illumination Gas Company of Trieste. The new agreement, whose terms were later modified, commissioned the company to provide uniform gas lighting for the entire area of Budapest from 16 December 1881 until 15 December 1895.

Thus reassured, the management of the illumination gas company could now set about implementing some long overdue improvements to expand production. As a first step they decided to build a new plant in Leopold Town, but then the choice eventually fell on a location bordered by Soroksári út—Koppány utca—Gubacsi út in the vicinity of the rapidly developing industrial area in the south. Here a gasholder with the record storage capacity of 35,000 cubic metres was built.

While gas was now used on a large scale in municipal lighting, the same could not be said for domestic illumination. Contemporary press reports sang the praises of the lighting system in the Opera House where "the suitably allocated gai lights and gas-lit chandeliers shed their luxurious radiance everywhere" at a time when the use of oil lamps in the private residences of neighbouring buildings was still the norm. With the spread of Edison's electric light bulb in the eighties, it seemed that the interior use of gas lighting had had its day. The use of the highly flammable, explosive and foul-smelling substance whose open flame required constant surveillance involved a complicated operation with the lights having to be ignited and extinguished one by one, and its flame was far too hot in the dog days of summer to boot. When fear of the competition urged the threatened gas-light business to implement major technological improvements, a new invention saved the neck of the investors. The novelty was called the Auer Light, in which the colourless flame of a Bunsen- burner heated a "mantle" soaked in a glowing substance. While the intensity and

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