A practical treatise on the manufacture and distribution of coal-gas. Its introduction and progressive improvement ... / [Samuel Clegg].

  • Samuel Clegg
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the manufacture and distribution of coal-gas. Its introduction and progressive improvement ... / [Samuel Clegg]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    A PRACTICAL TREATISE ON THE MANUFACTURE AND DISTRIBUTION OF COAL-GAS. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE INTRODUCTION OF LIGHTING BY COAL-GAS. In the earliest ages, and prior to the time from which records of extraordinary events have been handed down to us, the existence of an inflammable air appears to have been known. The perpetual fires and sacred lamps, regarded with superstition by the ancients, were fed by inflammable air issuing from fissures of rocks or springs of petroleum. The choke and fire-damp, so fatal in the experience of miners, was in modern times discovered to be the same gas, now so valuable for the purposes of illumination. Although both its useful and injurious properties appear thus to have been long partially known, no investigation of its nature was made, at least none published, until the end of February, 1659, when Mr. Thomas Shirley com- municated to the Royal Society some experiments upon the gas issuing from a well near Wigan in Lancashire. This paper will be found in the Philosophi- cal Transactions for June, 1667, and has also been published in former works B
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