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

From gashouse to natural gas mains

■ Selection oh kiteken appliancei using town gas

tion of gas to the public. The demands that began to grow as a result necessitated the construction of yet another plant, this one to be built in Francis Town (Ferencváros). An innovation introduced here was the water-gas generator, in which gas of high hydrogen content was made by passing steam over red-hot coal. The amount of gas sold by the end of the century had reached 38 million cubic metres. The combined length of the piping system grew from 97.5 to 434 kilometres in twenty years' time. The privately-owned company had reached the apex of its history when politics interfered.

As in several other large cities of the world, in Budapest, too, the authorities focused on acquiring ownership of utilities catering for the needs of large numbers of people as soon as possible. It was by taking over the operation of the largest suppliers that the municipalities intended to guarantee long-term planning on the one hand and turning the profits thus generated to such uses as best served the community's interests on the other. The project of communal takeover launched in 1906 was inaugurated by Mayor István Bárczy with these words: "... all those utilities and companies that are meant to satishy communal needs and use public areas hor their hacilities are to be consolidated under one, municipal, ownership".

As the neat annual profits earned by the illumination gas company were at 14 million korona, the city councillors had every reason to believe that the costs of pur16