Shortly after Archibald Cochrane first used coal gas for domestic lighting in the 1780s, fellow Scot William Murdoch gaslit his own home in Cornwall. Murdoch was then engaged to fit out several factories with gaslight (including his employers’, Boulton and Watt in Birmingham), and by the 1800s he and his assistant Samuel Clegg were bringing gas-lamps to London’s streets.

The introduction of gaslight to London was slow, thanks to a mistrust of gas shared by the public and many of the intelligentsia. Thanks to the determination of Murdoch and Clegg it was overcome and by Victoria’s accession in 1837 many of the capital’s streets, offices and places of public entertainment were all lit by coal gas.

115 words