QUOTE (Pew @ 3 Apr 2008, 13:04)
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>Thanks to dwb for sorting out my mistakes yesterday.
All I wanted to point out was that the term used by various people to describe a Gasholder as a 'gasometer' is wrong. Gasometers were in fact Meters, but rather crude ones, and have not been used since the 19th. century.
There is no such thing as a gasometer, but still plenty of gas holders even in the gas works were I started work on leaving school many years ago. Pew
Pew,
I think it is time to step in as a retired Fellow of the Institution of Gas Engineers and give the definitive explanation of the term "Gasometer".
A lowland Scot, William Murdoch, was the man who is credited as having invented gas lighting in 1792 when he conceived the idea of heating coal in a cast iron retort and collecting the resulting coal gas in an inverted vessel over water, this gas then being cleaned and piped around his house in Redruth in Cornwall to provide illumination. He called the vessel in which he collected and stored the gas, a "Gazometer" presumably because, by its height above water level, it provided a measure of how much gas was available for lighting the house. He went on to light factories with gas to enable the workers employed there to work longer days, much to the benefit of the owners.
As early as 1805 there started pedantic arguments about Murdoch's use of the term gasometer, but never the less the name caught on, and it seems that argument still continues 203 years later! There is categorical proof of the use of this term in letters written at the time to Messrs. Boulton and Watt.
Murdoch worked as a local agent for Messrs. Boulton and Watt on the maintenance and development of their steam engines used for pumping water out of Cornish tin mines. He also built a working model of a proposed steam carriage which he demonstrated in 1786 when he set it going to (quote) "Travil a mile or two in River's Great Room carrying shovel, poker and tongs". His employers failed to properly exploit his genious and his contribution to steam locomotion was overtaken by others such as Trevethick and Stephenson.
I am quoting as my reference "The Third Man - the life and times of William Murdoch, inventor of Gaslight" by John Griffiths published in 1992 by Andre Deutsch Ltd ISBN 0 233 98778 9
Louis Heath
