254 THE ADDRESSES, LECTURES, ETC., OF 



works of former days were perhaps the greatest of all producers of 

 smoke. St. Helens, and other centres of glass manufacture used 

 to be under a perpetual black cloud, whereas at the present time 

 it would be hardly possible to say whether the chimneys that still 

 remain were emitting any products of combustion at all. The 

 furnaces of iron and steel works were also thought incurable as 

 regards smoke, but a glance at the large steel works at Hallside, 

 belonging to the Steel Company of Scotland, will convince you 

 that the production of smoke is no longer an essential condition 

 to the working of those metals. Sir Henry Bessemer, in his late 

 able address in the City of London, alluded in the most kindly 

 manner to what 1 have done towards the economy of fuel by 

 means of these furnaces, and he certainly did not overstate the 

 case in saying that in melting steel by means of the regenerative 

 gas furnace one ton of small coal accomplished the work of two 

 tons of Durham coke. His testimony I look upon as being par- 

 ticularly valuable, coming as it does from the originator of the 

 world-famed Bessemer process in acknowledgment of a process 

 which he might regard as a rival to his own. Armed with such 

 testimony, I may be permitted to state that the total saving 

 effected by the use of the regenerative gas furnace amounts to 

 some millions of tons of coal per annum, proving that the abate- 

 ment of the intolerable smoke nuisance need not be advocated 

 solely upon public or philanthropic grounds, but may be also 

 sustained by an appeal to an enlightened self-interest. 



It is this large experience in the applications of gaseous fuel 

 which gives me, perhaps, some right to speak on the subject of 

 heating gas, both for domestic and other purposes. In the year 

 1863 I succeeded in interesting the Town Council of Birmingham 

 in the question, and they applied to Parliament for power to 

 supply that city with a separate service of heating gas ; but the 

 project was unfortunately nipped in the bud through loss of their 

 Bill in Parliament. Time, in fact, was not then ripe for the pro- 

 ject, but I believe that before long the gasworks themselves will 

 be tempted to take the matter up. 



The gas producer now used in connection with the regenerative 

 gas furnace yields a comparatively poor gas, and it has been mj 

 endeavour for some time to construct a gas producer which, with- 

 out losing the simplicity of the first should be capable of yielding a 



