applying their discovery, and it is fortunate for
them that they did not appear three centuries
earlier. I .am not speaking of Mr. Thomas
Shirley, whose " description of a well and earth
in Lancashire taking fire by a candle approached
to it," in 1667,* is the first known English
account of inflammable coal-gas; nor of Dr. John
Clayton's accidental discovery of the same fact
a few years later, when lie constructed the first
gas-holder by enclosing the gas in a bladder; nor
of Dr. Richard Watson, who experimented on
the same gas in various ways in 1767. I am
thinking of Mr. Spedding, who was the first to
apply coal-gas escaping' from a mine to any
economical purpose, by lighting his office at
Whitehaven with it about the same period, and who
made a proposition to the magistrates to light
the town in the same manner. His proposal
was simply refused, and little more was said;
but had Mr. Spedding lived in the fifteenth
instead of the eighteenth century, he would most
probably have been tortured as a wizard. Mr.
Murdock, the first recorded applier of artificially
manufactured gas to house-lighting purposes,
who began to use it in Cornwall in 1792, and
who seems to have partly purified it from smell
and smoke, while lighting Messrs. Boulton and
Watt's factory at Birmingham with it, in 1798,
was another gentleman who had cause to be
thankful to the age he lived in. His illuminations
at Birmingham in 1802, would have carried
him to the martyr's stake in the good old days;
and his successor, Mr. Winsor, would have been
nipped in the bud.

Much abuse has been lavished upon poor Mr.
Winsor, because he was not a sound scientific
man, and because he was energetic and
unscrupulous in carrying out his plans. His science
was sufficient to teach him what he had to deal
with; and he was the first man to light a
London street with gas, and the first to make
gas-lighting a branch of commerce. He
publicly exhibited his plan of illumination at the
Lyceum Theatre in 1803 and 1804; and he
lighted up one side of Pall-Mall in 1807. His
rude lighting was as much an advance upon the
old oil-lamps, as those lamps were an improvement
upon the old lighting system existing in
1716, when each householder, whose premises
fronted any street, lane, or passage, was required
to hang out one or more lights every dark night,
to burn from six to eleven o'clock, under the
penalty of one shilling. His commercial scheme
took the form of a National Light and Heat
Company, of very extravagant expectations;
but it merged at last into the Gaslight and Coke
Company, commonly called the Chartered Gas
Company, which worked nobly for many years
as a pioneer in gas-lighting, without the refreshing
taste of a dividend. Few persons, perhaps,
who were unlike Mr. Winsor, could have done
what he did in the face of so much opposition
grounded on caution and prejudice. While
scientific men were playing with the new
element in various ways, he helped to mould it
into the basis of a business corporation, and this
by unflinching perseverance, devotion to one
idea, an absence of sensitiveness, and great
oddity of character. Whatever his faults may
have been, whatever schemes he may have
originally planned for his own enrichment, he clung
to his speculation through all its early struggles,
and no one has ever shown that he amassed any
private fortune. He deceived himself, in his
imaginative estimates of profit, as much as he
deceived others; and some of his pamphlets are
distinguished, not only for their reckless statements,
but for the strength and indignation of
their tone. " All gas-lights," he says, " shown
and exhibited before my illuminating the large
theatre in the Lyceum, early in 1804, I fairly
consider as so many Will-o'-the-wisp lights
known for centuries past. The gas of these
lights has been caught and collected in bladders,
in marshy ground, the same as all coal-gas has
hitherto been produced in bladders for philosophical
amusement. The principle, that coal and
other combustibles contained, among other
products, a most beautiful and valuable flame, has
been known by the most learned of the last
century; but HOW to make the application——
HOW to save and analyse—— HOW to preserve and
refine—— HOW to conduct gas in proper air-tight
tubes—— HOW to introduce gas-fire and gas-lights
into a drawing-room, shop, and street-lamp——
HOW to cook, melt, boil, and distil by a gas-fire,
either in a kitchen or dining-room—— HOW to
introduce coke, tar, and ammonial liquor for the
advantage of a whole nation—— HOW to make gas-
fire and gas-lights applicable to light-houses,
telegraphs, culinary purposes—— in fine, HOW to
save and employ all the valuable parts of raw
fuel with the greatest possible advantage;— all
these most difficult points of my discovery were
left a problem to theorists, WHO could write,
but not practise——WHO could fill bladders from
retorts, tobacco-pipes, pots, pans, and gun-
barrels, with, raw smoke, but could not
illuminate——WHOSE delicate hands and noses would
have shrunk with horror from my numerous
dirty and laborious experiments in kitchens and
wash-houses, where my own labourers
complained of being suffocated, and often refused
to assist me, until I shamed them by the
example of stripping to perform what they thought
was too dirty work for them.

"Animated by the life and example of Peter
the Great, Emperor of all the Russias, who
performed the most abject labours to teach his
ministers and generals how to civilise a
barbarous nation, I did no longer deem it beneath
me (who had been a merchant in the city of
London) to do that work which some of my
labourers, actually in want of bread, refused to
do for victuals and payment."

Mr. Winsor, with all his pretence of mechanical
completeness, never contemplated the
erection of a gas-holder, or the storing of a
reserve of gas in anything except the main pipes.

It was left for Mr. Clegg, a pupil of Messrs.
Boulton and Watt, and the earliest permanent
engineer of the Chartered Gas Company, to introduce