Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 November 1874 — Lamp-Lighting Extraordinary. [ARTICLE]

Lamp-Lighting Extraordinary.

The Manchester papers have the following: “Some engineers in Baden have just contrived an ingenious piece of mechanism, which has already been adopted in some of the public buildings and streets of Heidelberg. The object is to provide for the simultaneous lighting of the gas-lights of the town. This has been done both in Paris and by us in the Albert Hall by the use of an electric wire, but the German engineers have invented a method more simple and durable. Their apparatus can be affixed equally to all gas-jets, and It is made to act, nut by any special mechanism, but simply by tjie increased pressure of the gas. which is always laid on from the gasometer when the lamps should be lighted. The one act of turning on the gas at the main ignites it at all the burners fitted with the new apparatus. In achieving this result the designers did not really obtain any very practical ad vantage- over the method oj ignition by electricity. But they pushed the invention still further, and have provided that when the pressure is diminished at the main the gas can either be totally extinguished or let down to a thread. It is chiefly in the lighting of the streets of a town that the invention will be of practical use. DirA'tly the gas is turned on the whole city will be simultaneously illuminated, and when in the early morn ing the pressure is reduced the light may be totally extinguished or gradually diminished.”