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THE TREND OF AFFAIRS

Gas
WILLIAM MURDOCH ran a small experimental gas plant in 1795, lighted a Soho factory by gas a few years later, and in 1808 was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society for his invention. The Gas Light and Coke Company was incorporated in London in 1812. In Baltimore, gas lighting got its start in the United States on June 17, 1816, when the city council passed an ordinance permitting Rembrandt Peale, not only to continue lighting his museum by gas, but to manufacture gas in quantities, lay pipes in the streets, and contract with the city for street lighting.
Electricity's advent, 60 years or so later, spelled the doom of lighting revenues to the gas industry, although temporary relief came about through securing most of the urban cooking load of the country. But, compared to other utilities, the gas people slumbered for years, notable for their unwillingness to adopt progressive practices. However, what has been accomplished since 1900 and, most strikingly in the natural gas industry within a decade, points to an encouraging future. Sales in the manufactured gas industry in this country have mounted annually for 25 years to quadruple what they were, but natural gas production has moved from 662,000 million cubic feet in 1921 to 2,000,000 million in 1929.

[[caption: New York Telephone Company "TECHNOLOGICAL TENUOUSNESS" - UNDERGROUND TELEPHONE CABLES IN NEW YORK AFTER A SUBWAY FIRE]]

Creation of new uses for gas - in mechanical-refrigeration, for domestic heating of water and of houses and apartments, and in manifold industrial operations - accounts for acceleration of demand. Interconnection of small plants to eliminate wasteful and obsolete producers, cutting down overhead and obtaining diversity of load, and the transportation of gas under compression through long distance pipelines, have made it possible to keep pace with the demand.
Pipelines are a most important factor in the development of the natural gas industry, a three-fourths of the United States recognizes natural gas as a dominant form of fuel. Its comparative cheapness combined with the ease by which its heat can be controlled, the fuel storage space it frees for other uses, the liberation of capital hitherto tied up in coal piles, the elimination of smoke and ash, make natural gas especially popular with industrial users.
Trunk and subsidiary pipelines in the United States now total nearly 200,000 miles, the longest present transmission being from the Louisiana fields to Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia - 469 miles. This system with lateral lines totals nearly 1,000 miles and it includes six separate lines at the bottom of the Mississippi to prevent any possible interruption of service. The changeover of burners in Atlanta where manufactured gas had been in use 75 years, involving as it did nearly a million separate operations (for five to eight burners must be changed on each gas range), illustrates a single minor phase of this stupendous operation.
From the Monroe-Richland field of Louisiana, natural gas is now being pumped 447 miles to St. Louis, crossing 15 rivers on the way; from the Texas Panhandle, 350 miles to Denver, from the San Joaquin Valley, 250 miles to San Francisco, from Wyoming, 290 miles to Salt Lake City and Ogden. Still larger projects are contemplated: from the Texas Panhandle to Chicago and adjoining areas, 1,250 miles, and others.
Present lines are from 14 to 24 inches in diameter and the development of steel pipe has made them capable of withstanding 300 to 600 pounds per square inch pressure. Improvements in manufacturing, laying methods, and ways of preventing corrosion make it possible that pipelines can now be constructed for less money than electrical transmission lines of equivalent energy capacity. The effect on public health can be imagined when it is estimated that smoke and soot are not accountable for a deposit of 460 tons annually on a square mile in Chicago.
Some apprehension exists as to what will become of the vast sums buried in pipelines if the supply of gas is exhausted. To this Power replies: "Processes are even now in the making which assure an abundant gas supply.... No great stretch of imagination is required to warrant the prediction that pipelines will transmit gas as long as they themselves exist."
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