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

From gashouse to natural gas mains

er flickering weekly in a tin oil lamp, was actually lit on 9 November 1777. Although the separate funds required for the laying of water mains, paving the streets and installing lighting were made available, the town council decided to give preferential treatment to water utilities - at the expense of developing municipal lighting - in the town, which was mainly built on the slopes of a hilly area. That was why only seventeen street lamps were set up.

Pest still dragged its feet until the university was moved to that side of the Danube, when the Council found that the time was right for the installation of lamp- posts set up every forty metres. The funds required were raised from the areas divided into allotments lying outside the Vác Gate in the emerging Leopold Town (Lipótváros) area. The glass-walled lamphouses were made by the Pest tinkers’ guild. The oil wickers housed in the lamps were first lit on 1 January 1790, but their use was severely restricted with no lamps lit at all on moonlit nights with the lights being allowed to burn until daybreak exclusively during carnival time. At first the lamps were affixed to the walls of buildings before they were set upon wooden posts driven into the ground thus allowing them to illuminate a larger expanse. Right from its establishment, the Beautification Committee urged that the lights illuminate the streets all night every night except when there was a full moon, and in no more tan two decades there were as many as 1,500 lights flanking the city’s major thoroughfares. Their maintenance was financed out of revenues accruing from a surtax levied by the magistrate on wines for this specific purpose. Despite its obvious benefits, the need for further developing street illumination was questioned by many, arguing that "a decent per&on returru home before 9 o’clock at night. ” And that at a time when a serious competitor had arrived to challenge the monopoly of oil wickers in the shape of lights using illuminating gas.

From the 17th century, gas was obtained from the destructive distillation of coal, but the early inventors did so at the risk of their lives. Half a century on, reports of successful advances were coming in thick and fast: in the city of Leuven in 1784, Jan Peter Minkelaers lit up a lecture hall, a year later Philippe Lebon extracted gas from wood and then coal, which he used to light his residence, and Dr Pickel of Würzburg illuminated his dispensary with gas distilled from animal bones. Lord Archibald of Dun- donald went further when he sealed gas in a tin barrel for storage. Foundations of gas manufacture on an industrial scale were laid by William Murdoch. When the experiments aroused the interest of steam-engine king James Watt and his company Boulton and Watt, they commissioned the Scottish-born engineer to supply gas for their manufactory. Murdoch was followed by Samuel Clegg, who made advances in the field of

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