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Updated: June 3, 2025
While these changes have been going on, and while improved methods of manufacture have been tending to the cheapening of gas, it will have been steadily growing in public favor as a fuel; and if in years to come the generation of electricity should have been so cheapened as to allow it to successfully compete with gas as an illuminant, the gas works will still be found as busy as of yore, the holder of gas shares as contented as to-day; for with a desire for a purer atmosphere and a white mist instead of a yellow fog, gas will have largely supplanted coal as a fuel, and gas stoves, properly ventilated and free from the reproaches I have hurled at them to-night, will burn a gas far higher in its heating power, far better in its power of bearing illuminating hydrocarbons, and free from poisonous constituents.
We have passed out of neither and yet we have come into another age that of petroleum. As a lubricant, it has become of such universal use that it has been called the barometer of industry, and no doubt after it has ceased to be a popular illuminant or a source of power it will live invaluable as the thing which lets the wheels go round.
Our next step was to see this wonderful illuminant for night work, and in the course of our wandering's we came across a large fort from which searchlights had been showing the previous night.
Might it be not otherwise with the imaginative, the intellectual, heat and light; the real need being that of an interpreter Apollo, illuminant rather as the revealer than as the bringer of light?
One thing is certain, at any rate, and that is, that in augmenting the potential and frequency we rapidly intensify the streams; and, though it may be very sanguine, it is surely not altogether hopeless to expect that we may succeed in producing a practical illuminant on these lines.
As a new illuminant for the streets, the arc had become familiar, either as a direct substitute for the low gas lamp along the sidewalk curb, or as a novel form of moonlight, raised in groups at the top of lofty towers often a hundred and fifty feet high.
It is true that there were explosions, and distinguished men like Davy and Watt opined that the illuminant was too dangerous; but the "spirit of coal" had demonstrated its usefulness convincingly, and a commercial development began, which, for extent and rapidity, was not inferior to that marking the concurrent adoption of steam in industry and transportation.
One of the most interesting of the many electro-chemical processes is the heating of lime and coke in the electric furnace so as to obtain a product in the form of calcium carbide, which, on solution in water, forms acetylene gas, a useful and valuable illuminant.
Away in the distance the same clock as I had heard before struck the quarter a single, clear chime. It was the regular bedroom of the maison meublée worn carpet, discoloured and dingy wallpaper, faded rep curtains and mahogany bedstead with a vast édredon, like a giant pincushion. My candle, guttering wildly in the unaccustomed breeze blowing dankly through the chamber, was the sole illuminant.
The d'Orient was delightfully comfortable and fabulously cheap. The wayfarer entered a darksome passage that led to an inner court. There were on the four sides of this seven or eight stories pierced by many windows. There was never a lift, or what we Americans call an elevator. If you wanted to go up you walked up; and after dark your single illuminant was candlelight.
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