Imagine, if you will, Victorian London. The industrial revolution is still taking off and is in its cradle.
Gas lighting has started to pop up around the city to illuminate bridges and streets and you’ve heard that they just started implementing it in some of the bigger theatres in town. You get curious and marvel at this technology of gas lighting, seeing it as the future and as a sign of modernity.
Over the course of a decade you start getting used to seeing it becoming more common around different parts of your city and as a result you hear people say that the streets are becoming safer as crime rates are dropping.
Regulation also starts changing and people are no longer forced by the government to hang lanterns outside their street-facing window to light the street communally.
You would no longer get fined 1 shilling for not hanging out a lantern at night between 6 and 11 at night. Lighting the streets has stopped being a communal effort and has instead become a public good.
From communal lighting with candles to public lighting with gas
Since the beginning of the 1800s Gas lighting has been experimented with and the creative minds who played around with it wondered how they could make this technology, with obvious improvement potential, commercially viable.
The first testbed for this technology was textile factories in England where the owners wanted cheaper, better and safer alternatives to the hazardous candle-lighting or oil lamps. So they switched from candles to “invisible flame” transported via piping throughout the factories.
The factories could now operate longer into the evening and night, and so the advent of gas found an appreciative client in these factories.
A successful first case which allowed for further tweaking before gas hit the streets, literally. The obvious and immediate drawbacks, however, were the heat and the smell that the gas lighting generated, but in a larger factory or in outside street lighting this was not seen as a problem.
London became the first city to get gaslighting and in 1820 Paris joined with gas lighting on their streets. Slowly, or quickly depending on how you see it, more cities, more towns, more theatres and more coffee houses adopted gaslighting. With each new niche gas lighting had to make leaps in quality and safety (flammable gas in the hands of non-specialized novices is bound to have consequences)
It took a long time to get broad coverage and conquer entire countries, gas plants had to be built for producing gas from peat, coal or wood. Gas piping had to be laid down in the streets and inside theatres and factories and the government had to decide how they would regulate the sector (can you imagine the insurance companies’ screaming?). Slowly but surely a sector was being created and a network of piping and gas factories was being established, becoming a significant infrastructure investment.
It was a hot sector with patents getting filed for new improvements in the gas production and lighting processes as well as franchises being created to deliver this low-cost alternative.
The evidence regarding improved safety and being able to work, study or keep coffee shops open longer was a significant win for everyone in society and drove adoption. The story of gaslighting in the 19th century is one of “More light”.
The various inventions, improvements, incorporations and policies were invented or created to deliver the service effectively first to factories, then to the street lights, then to theaters and museums and coffee shops, and also to the well-off. An industry was created from the amalgamations of several inventions.
Eventually richer individuals felt the urge to get gaslighting at home. You can imagine the marvel of the new lighting and the sign of status that it brought, but as it was hitting theatres, coffee houses and the homes of the well-off, the smell and heat that the gas lighting gave off became more and more of a nuisance.
An entire gas lighting industry has fully emerged, with players and lamp-makers and everything else in place. Spurred on by the realization that it made streets safer, allowed factories to run longer and eventually allowed people to read and learn longer, further accelerating the industrial revolution.
So how did electric lighting come into the market?
If the advent of gas lighting seems straight forward and unproblematic, then it is of course too good to be true (this text is a linear reconstruction).
Legislation stood against it and satire was also drawn and created about the dangers of gas lighting, but the opposition was little in comparison to the one that electric lighting met. While gas had come into and created a virtually untapped market, electric lighting came into a highly saturated and mature market, with plenty of losers if they should succeed.
Around 1890 when the electric lighting was realistically hitting the stage and competing, gas-lighting was a mature technology and an entire industry was already well established.
[Ind. Structure:] There were profitable producers of gas, of lamps and of lighting apparatus, and there were companies who distributed and charged for their services, with several other entities such as cities and theatres and coffee shops as consumers.
[Technology & Infra.:]There was extensive and profitable pipe-distribution networks and gas factories (in the thousands per country), along with significant know-how as to how to get high quality gas and
[Knowledge base] Significant knowledge around ensuring safety from fires and to ensure brighter flames. Entire professions and specializations had been built on gas.
[Policies & Reg.:] There was regulation in place to regulate who and how ownership and delivery of services were to be organized.
[Markets & Users:] With all this in place and it was now clear how and who to ask in order to draw a pipe from the gas factory and pipeline network to a new clients property. It was possible to simply keep adding on new producers and new consumers, by the dozen, the city, the theatres, the coffee shops, peoples’ homes.
[Symbolic meaning, & Guiding Princ.:] People started getting used to the idea of being a consumer of gas lighting rather than having to purchase candles and lamps for their own lighting and they knew how to ensure safety with the gas lighting. They became comfortable with being able to adjust the light individually in the rooms and having copper-piping run along the walls, which became the common practice. We can imagine gaslighting becoming the symbol of status and of progress. The ability to read longer and work longer had created a sense of indispensability, and life without gas-lighting became unimaginable for the city and towns-folk, having now been weaved into the very fabric of the city and society.
The Electric David and the Gas Goliath
When electric lighting came it was, for one, nowhere near as cheap as gas lighting could be or had been when it was taking over from candles.
We can also imagine it being a big conceptual leap for the people of the times. Gas burning is an intuitive and known process that people are comfortable with and can understand. People understood that if they opened the valve for more gas, the light would grow brighter and the flame would grow larger. To have a plain cable connected to a bit of glass bulb to produce light must have been very counterintuitive (nothing was burning?!).
There was an entire gas network which on the one hand had incredible inertia, being an established infrastructure investment, but on the other hand meant that people were already comfortable with the idea of central production and attached consumption networks. This must have been a big leap in our symbolic understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the city/town. Thomas Edison had from the beginning a price target for electric lighting such that it would be able to compete with the gas industry, which simultaneously as electrification was happening fought back with innovations of their own.
For these and many other reasons Thomas Edison is quoted as saying that they had to “Dress electricity in a gas costume”. He modelled the mains-network to imitate the gas network, and instead of gas factories he had distributed generators servicing a general area (we already have processes for digging pipes, why not cables?). Cabling in house lighting, was often placed in copper pipes, to imitate what people were comfortable with.
In parallel, a new culture and symbolism was being created around electricity as magical shows and demonstrations were put on to affect the public perception. But lighting at home has to feel safe, not new and exciting. In order to shift the perception, early promotion of Edison’s electric lighting also lifted the dangers and deaths caused by gas in the home.
Undoubtedly, electricity’s applicability to railway cars and other technologies in factories also further increased the comfort-level with electricity.
There were several challenges regarding licenses, regulation, patents and inventions that needed to be met in order to enter the market. All of it designed for gas. For this reason as well, adopting a “gas costume” helped mitigate too large risks.
Yet the competition from gas was fierce. The network was well established and the price point was low. Any invention on the part of electric lighting was countered by the “Gas mantle” invention by Carl Auer von Welsbach and the improvement in gas production processes, both leading to brighter light and better quality. At the same time several technological and knowledge-based challenges still remained. How do we measure and charge for electric use, in a way that is easy for the customers? How do we make sure that the voltage is correct for the lighting (which is different from railcars or factory motors)? How do we draw up electric grids so that service quality is ensured and profitability can be had at a competitive price-point? How do we make it safe for people to have in their homes?
These questions sparked large-scale inventions, patenting, fighting and consolidations of companies. Amongst these was the known, and not always logical, infighting between AC and DC electric transmission proponents. Nothing could be better for gas than a divided opposition, but through consolidations and eventually the merger of Edison & Thomson-Houston to form General Electric, the electric lighting won out.
Eventually the cumulative, and messy, process of inventions and research had arrived at efficient lightbulbs, the transformer in 1883, the efficient AC-motor courtesy of Nikola Tesla in 1888, and the electric meters for charging customers, then electric lighting had finally gained enough ground to start competing for real. With Alternating Current (AC) we could transport electric energy large distances without large losses and it could be adapted to the right voltage, on-site. Gas, was still only transported shorter distances. Efficient AC-motors also meant that the newly forming regime could settle on AC-current for all factory, railcar and lighting applications as the dominant standard (which we still have today for the same technical reasons). And electromagnetic and chemical meters were created to be able to charge the customers the correct amount of electricity.
It was now easier to generate, transport and charge for electric lighting, which meant it was highly competitive and the consumers were experiencing better lighting without the excessive heat and smell from burning gas (they weren’t quite as aware of the health defects of gas burning).
Yet dual-fuel fixtures (allowing both gas and electric lighting) existed for over 20 years of this fighting. Eventually gas also found new niches that it could tap into such as cooking and heating that diminished the pain and fighting from losing the lighting market…. And we have now arrived at the beginning of the 20thCentury.
What similar trends do you see in the 21st Century?
Sources:
Blomkvist,P. & Johansson, P. 2016. A Dynamic Mind. Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan. http://mdh.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1251714&dswid=5335
Schot, J.(1998). The usefulness of evolutionary models for explaining innovation. The case of the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. History and Technology. 14(3),173-200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341519808581928
Boyer, R. (2013). Transitioning to Sustainable Urban Development: A niche-based approach [Published dissertation]. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/44301
Schot, J. & Geels, F. (2008). Strategic niche management and sustainable innovation journeys: theory, findings, research agenda, and policy. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management. 20(5), pp 537-554. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537320802292651
National Museum of American History. (n.d.). Lighting a Revolution. https://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/19thcent/comp19.htm
Natural Gas.Org (n.d.). The History of Regulation. http://naturalgas.org/regulation/history/
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