Gaslight illuminates a Philadelphia building.
Dave Bartruff/Corbis View Slideshow 
__1816: __Gaslight illuminates Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Theatre. Theater patrons are living in an age of wonders: lights that burn "without wick or oil."
Merchant Charles Kugler wanted to construct a gasworks to bring to Philadelphia the modern marvel that was illuminating the streets of London. He set up a demonstration of gaslight at Peale's Museum, which was run by Philadelphia painter Rembrandt Peale.
Typical lighting for the time was by candle or whale-oil lamps. Kugler felt that the cutting-edge technology of producing lighting gas from coal produced such a bad smell that, in Peale's words it "could not, with propriety, be established but at a distance from the city." What's more, coal was often expensive or scarce.
Kugler improved the method by replacing coal with pitch, which was derived from trees and therefore abundant. Pitch was also largely free of the noxious, rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide.
Peale praised Kugler's innovation: "[B]y a simple apparatus, easily managed, without anything offensive in the operation, he prepares a gas at once cheaper and more brilliant, than that prepared from coal."
Kugler's technique used turpentine (also tree-derived) to dissolve the pitch, which was heated in a sealed chamber separate from the firebox beneath it. The resultant gas was passed through a chemical bath to remove tars and odor-causing chemicals. It was then collected under a weighted hood that could be adjusted to keep the clean lighting gas at sufficient pressure to feed the gaslight fixtures in the theater.
Kugler installed the furnace and gas-storage tanks in a room right next to the auditorium of the theater building. Inspired by London's famous Covent Garden Theatre, the Chestnut Street Theatre stood at the northwest corner of Sixth and Chestnut Streets.
The young nation's first purpose-built theatrical venue, it was built between 1792 and 1805 at a cost of $30,000 (about $600,000 in today's money). One of the Chestnut Street's architects was Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who was also working on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
Kugler faced some opposition. Some Philadelphians denounced the gasworks (.pdf) as a danger to public health and safety, maintaining that the plant would emit a stench that was both unpleasant and unhealthy. Further, the gaslight, they said, would use up oxygen and affect the lungs of those in the theater. What's more, an explosion would kill or maim people.
Amidst this display of brotherly love, the theater managers announced they were "happy to be the first to introduce this system of lighting theaters and flatter themselves that its superior safety, brilliancy and neatness will be satisfactorily expressed by the audience." And so it was.
Nonetheless, the Chestnut Street Theatre burned to the ground in 1820. It may have been arson, or ...
Source: Chestnut Street Theatre Project
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