ILLUMINATING GAS.

WRITTEN FOR THE TWENTY-NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN GAS LIGHT ASSOCIATION, BY T. LITTLEHALES, SYRACUSE, N. Y.

The whirligig of time brings about strange changes, and often illustrates the saying that the new is only the old made over again. Discoveries supposed to be new are often found to be only a fresh bringing to light of facts known long ago. Great latent possibilities and powers often exist unobserved in connection with daily operations, until some radical innovator, who, not content to take things for granted, or as he finds them, turns them upside down, looks under, over and through them, turns them end for end, and possibly turns them inside out and shows us unexpected things.

Ovens for gas-making had been used, and had been superseded by the retort long before many of the members of the American Gas Light Association had ever seen the inside of a gas works. They were largely used in Scotland at one time, and I personally can well remember as a youth, in my student days, hearing ovens defended by one who had used them thirty years prior to that time, their chief merit as compared with retorts being their much greater durability, their chief defect, that the fuel account to heat them was very high. And the differences between the ovens of those days and the present are no greater than between the retort systems of the early period of gas-making and those of the present day.

Sometimes things are ahead of their time, or conditions are not favorable to their development. As a notable instance of this latter feature in connection with the gas industry, the following is a striking example:

About fifty years ago two of the eminent London Gas Engineers of that time Messrs. S. and T. N. Kirkham brought forward the idea of making water gas by the decomposition of steam in con

tact with incandescent carbon, and took out patents for the same, in 1852. But neither London nor Paris could be induced to take it in hand; consequently the idea laid practically dormant for upwards of twenty five years, when Mr. T. S. C. Lowe, in this country, put the matter on a new basis, and mineral oil having been discovered in the meantime, and Mr. Lowe's efforts being supplemented by the great skill, energy and perseverance of a few others, water gas making became a commercial success. And today London, British, and in fact European gas interests generally, have been and are greatly enhanced and benefited by water gas methods, developed, improved and firmly established in the United States and taken back to Britain again a solid success.

I think it justly due to a distinguished member of this Association, and one of its past presidents, to add, in this connection, that probably no one man has done as much to place water gas in the position it occupies to-day in the gas world as our esteemed colleague, Mr. Alexander C. Humphreys.

Then, again, vested interests, with the inevitable conservatism surrounding them, often stand in the way of new methods. But these, however strong, cannot successfully resist the march of progress, and sooner or later they join in the procession and move onward.

From the earliest history of gas manufacture, every progressive gas man has sought to cheapen production by improving the methods, by the introduction of labor-saving contrivances, especially in the handling of coal by machinery, etc., and the gas interests are greatly indebted to those who have been the pioneers in all these efforts for improvements Changes amounting almost to revolutions have taken place in the various phases of the gas industry within the memory of the older members of the American Gas Light Association, and we must not for a moment suppose finality has been reached, but must expect many developments to be revealed by the future, probably to the extent of more revolutions, of which coke ovens, as they have hitherto been called (because the production of coke therein has been the primary consideration) will be one very important and prominent feature; but the time has now arrived when they should no longer be called coke ovens, but gas ovens, or perhaps more correctly retort ovens, because they are, in all essential respects, retorts on a large scale, practically differing only from the ordinary retorts in their greater capacity,