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Reflections
Era of manufactured gas burned brightly, but soon flickered : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisEra of manufactured gas burned brightly, but soon flickered
| by Roger Matile
| 8/11/2011
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I got to thinking about some of the slang expressions we used to use as kids the other day, and one that popped right into my mind was "Boy, now you're cookin' with gas!"
It meant that things were really going well, but even by the time we were using it in the late 1950s it was obsolete. The original expression was in praise of high-tech manufactured coal gas piped to homes in larger towns and cities starting in the 1800s. Gaslights and large old gas stoves and ovens might not sound like high-tech to us today, but compared with the wood burning cook stoves and kerosene lamps they replaced, they were the cat's pajamas.
The gas of the "Gaslight Era" was not today's clean natural gas nor was it the liquefied natural gas-propane-with which we're familiar. Instead, it was manufactured gas.
Manufactured gas required, as the name implies, a factory. There, coal was heated to liberate the gas it contained. Various machines in the factory then removed a variety of impurities from the gas (mostly hydrogen and methane with some carbon monoxide) before it was allowed to flow into large tanks, from which it was forced through mains to homes, stores, churches and businesses.
The impurities removed before the gas was piped to users were really nasty. But like polluters through the ages, the companies had no compunctions about simply either burying the stuff in the ground or dumping it into any nearby stream. Unfortunately for future generations, the waste was either simply poisonous or turned out to be aggressively carcinogenic, and it's all virtually indestructible by natural processes. It's no accident that some of the nation's worst Superfund cleanup sites are old manufactured gas plants.
But back to the gas produced. The limiting factor was that mains had to be extended from the gas factory to users. Generally, it took at least a medium-sized town to support even a small gas factory. However, as Aurora grew and as Western United Gas and Electric Company expanded its operations, gas mains were gradually extended south to Montgomery and Oswego and by 1913 all the way to Yorkville, Plano, and Sandwich.
The economics of the era of the 1890s and early 1900s simply didn't allow for smaller towns to have their own manufactured gas plants, nor for lines to be extended to rural areas. Instead, individual acetylene gas generators were developed for home use.
In Oswego, hardware merchant John Edwards invented and patented an acetylene gas generator about 1900 that was available in several sizes designed to supply sufficient gas to light everything from small homes to large businesses. The generators used various techniques to add carbide crystals (with which Union Carbide made its first fortune) to a tank of water, producing acetylene gas. The generators were usually located in buildings' basements with attached pipes extending up through the walls to supply wall and ceiling fixtures in each room and even to cooking stoves.
Edwards supplied the units for many homes in and around Oswego, along with two of the town's churches.
On May 1, 1901, the Kendall County Record's Oswego correspondent remarked: "'Let there be light,' and that the acetylene, so thought Doc Woolley and James Pearce, who had it put in their residences by John Edwards, whose generator of the gas is considered the best extant."
Eventually, Western United decided there was money to be made down river from their gas plant on River Street in Aurora. In February 1912, the Record reported that "the Western United Gas and Electric company was given a 50 year franchise to furnish gas and electric lights in Oswego. This permission comes after a summer's work by the company in getting their gas pipes laid to Oswego." Then in 1913, work on extending gas mains farther south to Yorkville and on to Sandwich began, with a steam shovel trenching along modern U.S. Route 34. By December 3, 1913, the Record reported they were using gas in their Yorkville office to melt the lead for their Linotype machine, replacing the old gasoline burner. In March 1918, Western United reported they had installed 1,718 miles of gas pipe to serve 60,000 customers all over the region.
But manufactured gas was, as noted above, a dirty business, resulting in horrific pollution of the Fox River. By May of 1922, Record Editor Hugh R. Marshall was bitterly complaining the Fox River was being destroyed by pollution: "But now come the gas company, and other factories up the river, with their continued pollution of the waters in direct defiance of the laws and orders of the state and authorities. Fish are dying by the tons and they are floating in the quiet spots filling the air with their stench and the water with possible contamination."
The eventual solution was to provide natural gas instead of manufactured coal gas. The first natural gas pipeline to Illinois from wells in Texas and Oklahoma built by the Continental Construction Company was finished by 1931. At first, there wasn't enough natural gas to supply the pure product to customers, so Western United petitioned the Illinois Commerce Commission on Sept. 22, 1931 for permission to supply a mixture of natural and manufactured gas.
According to the Oct. 28, 1931 Record: "An army of 500 specially trained service men of the Western United Gas and Electric company will start work in the downriver towns including Montgomery Oswego, Bristol Yorkville, Plano, and Sandwich on Friday, Oct. 30, making the necessary adjustments on gas burning appliances to utilize natural gas."
By that November, residents were enjoying cleaner burning gas. With the construction of more pipelines after World War II, manufactured gas was phased out.
Today, Nicor Gas, the direct descendant of Western United, provides natural gas that heats the majority of the area's homes and cooks the food in many more. Though the gaslight era is long gone, recalled only in period movies, back in the days when horses and buggies ruled the area's roads, there was nothing like cooking with gas.
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