PREFACE. THIS little work, on a new and improved system of making illuminating and heating gas from every kind of hydrocarbon, is not intended to be a scientific disquisition on the destructive distillation of hydrocarbons. It is intended for the benefit of practical men who are interested in the subject, and who do not believe in the impossibility of making gas from tar and oil, or of improving the present modes of making gas from coal; but who may not yet have tried to make gas by the method I have undertaken and endeavoured to describe in this little book, hoping they will put it to the practical test, and not condemn the plan because it does not agree with certain published theoretical opinions. I trust the work may also be of some little benefit to students in chemistry, and apprentices in gas making. I make no pretence to teach "more experienced men than myself"; although 'The Journal of Gas Lighting' declares I have "gone out of my way" to do so. I leave that task wholly in the hands of 'The Journal of Gas Lighting,' which appears to have taken all such under its protecting and nursing wings with much peculiar care. M231894 ILLUMINATING AND HEATING GAS. INTRODUCTION. A NEW AND IMPROVED METHOD OF MAKING ILLUMINATING AND HEATING GAS FROM EVERY KIND OF HYDROCARBON. WHEN coals are distilled for making gas by the ordinary methods at present in practice, they produce from 10 to 15 gallons of tar per ton of coals carbonised; and it is a well-known fact to gas engineers and managers that the tar distilled from the coal in the manufacture of illuminating gas contains as much illuminating matter as exists in the gas produced, and innumerable attempts have been made by engineers, chemists, and gas managers, to convert the tar into permanent illuminating gas, but all attempts to do so on a large manufacturing scale have proved failures hitherto. A favourite process of utilising tar with experimentalists and schemers for a long time was to distil the tar for the naphtha and other volatile oils or spirits, and then carburet atmospheric air with the volatile vapours obtained B |