PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 31 



coal, he called the produced gas " spirit of coal," and does not seem 

 to have had any higher idea of its inflammable quality than that it 

 could amuse himself and his friends. In 1767 Dr. Watson, Bishop 

 of Landaff, published a work on chemistry, in which he has shown 

 the inflammable and elastic quality of this gas, and that the former 

 is not destroyed by passing the gas through water : he carried the 

 subject no farther, and during the next period of thirty years history 

 is silent on the subject. 



The lecturer gave it as his opinion, that Sir Humphrey Davy, in 

 his laborious, patient, and sometimes dangerous investigations of the 

 fire damp, tended materially to assist contemporary philosophers 

 whose researches were more exclusively devoted to the science of 

 gas illumination. 



Although the honor of having applied gas to the purposes of illu- 

 mination has been accorded by many to a German gentleman, named 

 Frederick Albert Wintzer, or, as his name was subsequently spelled, 

 Winsor, we shall find by reference to the page of history, that Mr. 

 W. Murdoch, a Scotch gentleman, in the employment of Messrs. 

 Boulton and Watt, who resided at Redruth, Cornwall, in 1792, 

 lighted his house and offices with gas at that time : he was removed 

 by his employers to Ayreshire, in Scotland, in 1797, where he again 

 lighted his residence with gas ; and in 1798, the workmen of Messrs. 

 Boulton and Watts' manufactory, at Soho, near Birmingham, were 

 allowed the benefit of his invention. When peace was proclaimed, in 

 1802, Mr. Murdoch illuminated this extensive series of buildings 

 with gas lights, on which occasion the novel display was witnessed 

 by unnumbered thousands from Birmingham and the surrounding- 

 districts. These facts immediately nullify Mr. Winsor's claim of 

 priority in so important a matter; since, by his own shewing, and 

 the admission of his friends, his first public display was made on 

 the walls of Carlton Palace, on the king's birth day, in 1803. Thus 

 far the rise of gas illumination, the remainder of the lecture related 

 to its progress. 



A gas-light company was formed in London in 1809, with Mr. 

 Winsor at its head ; others were subsequently set on foot ; and in 

 1810 parliament granted its protection to the design, yet in 1814 

 there were but a few lights in use, and those were in the locality of 

 Westminster : the company however was not idle, costly experiments 

 had been made, ground purchased, apparatus procured, and 50 miles 

 of main pipe had been laid down : thus was marked out the ground 

 work of one of the most magnificent and extensive trading concerns 

 in the world. The lecturer traced out, with great clearness and 



