ABSTRACT
Manufactured gas was one of the great industrial enterprises of the nineteenth century. Its active history, worldwide, spanned about 170 years, extending past the halfway mark of the twentieth century. In this time, an unusual array of inventive and economic forces played back and forth across this dynamic industry. Thermal stress and chemical corrosion tore away at the gas machines and their associated production, puriŽcation, and storage systems; technological invention promised better methods as well as threats from competitors; consumer agitation and economic competition drove gas prices lower and lower; demands from the new and expanding coal-tar chemical industry showed promises; electricity and natural gas pressed hard on all fronts; and coal strikes, Žnancial panics, depressions, and war curtailed their operations. The manufactured gas industry was anything but static.
