Читать книгу Description of the Process of Manufacturing Coal Gas. For the Lighting of Streets Houses, and Public Buildings онлайн

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It was an invention not exempted from the misfortune common to all innovations on established practises, of encountering opposition, but it had the fortune common to few, of obtaining an almost instantaneous triumph.

A single exhibition of the gas lights in actual use was sufficient to determine the public judgment in favour of the new mode of illumination; to see was in this case, indeed to believe.

The legislature responsive to the popular voice, and fortified in its responsibility, by the results of special enquiries which were ordered to be made into the merits of the invention, and in which I had the good fortune to be professionally engaged, gave the most liberal and decided encouragement to its adoption.

Capital, often wanting even in this opulent country for undertakings of magnitude, came to the promotion of the new art of procuring and distributing light in overflowing abundance; and already ere many years are elapsed, such has been the rapidity with which the gas light illumination has advanced, that there is not a city and scarcely a town of any note in Great Britain, in which the art of lighting by means of gas, has not been carried into effect, or in which active measures are not in progress, to participate in the benefit of this important discovery.