ABSTRACT
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The manufactured gas industry supplied high-quality urban lighting and heating for more than a century, from the early 1820s until the 1950s. Gas lighting dominated the high end of the lighting market, in parallel with relatively inexpensive whale oil and kerosene lighting, and eventually lost market share to even higher-quality electric lighting. The history of the gas light era offers lessons on quality energy services being provided through networked energy infrastructures and therefore contains interesting analogies to hydrogen infrastructure. This history is a mixture of successes and failures, with lessons on how technological innovations, market competition, adaptability, and intentional market transformation efforts can combine to shift the course of large energy systems. This chapter reviews this history with the goal of informing hydrogen infrastructure development challenges. The manufactured gas history is also rich with lessons for a broader range of technology policy issues, as demonstrated by several in-depth studies (Stotz and Jamison 1938; Castaneda 1999; Tarr 1999).
