It鈥檚 the 1930s. You鈥檙e chairman of one of Britain鈥檚 gas companies. A fair slice of your domestic sales is to customers who still use your product for lighting their homes. Gas lamps may be noisy, smelly and dirty-but installing mains electricity costs money, so your shareholders can be confident that gas sales will remain buoyant for a few decades yet. Except for one threat: the electrical wireless receiving apparatus invented by Mr Marconi.
With the increasing popularity of the programmes being transmitted by the British Broadcasting Corporation, it dawns on you that wireless poses a growing menace to the gas industry. The public may go on tolerating the yellowish wavering light from their hissing gas mantles, but will they be prepared to pass up an opportunity of tuning in to the BBC鈥檚 entertaining and instructive wireless broadcasts? Maybe not. The challenge, clearly, is to build a wireless powered by gas. Among those answering this challenge is Henry Milnes of Bingley in West Yorkshire.
WHAT with Children鈥檚 Hour, regular bulletins of news (read twice, 鈥渇irst rapidly, and then slowly to enable listeners-in to take notes鈥�), and music from Jack Payne and the BBC Dance Orchestra, in the 1920s wireless listening was all the rage. A minority of Britons were already wired up for mains electricity, but many more relied on heavy lead-acid accumulators to power their radios. These had to be taken to a local shop for recharging. This was inconvenient or, in the case of spillage, hazardous. The trams in Southampton, for example, carried notices requesting passengers not to put their accumulators on the seats.
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The gas industry was well aware of what the newer energy source was doing to it. The author of an article in the Gas Journal of 5 July 1939 adopted a pained, almost resentful tone. 鈥淭here are, we suppose, few gas undertakings who have not suffered in greater or lesser degree the loss of valuable loads as a direct result of the all-mains electrical wireless set. Nor have our electrical friends been slow to take advantage of this 鈥榯hin end of the wedge鈥� in their sales campaigns. Indeed, it is safe to assume that the wireless set has more often than not turned the scales in favour of installing electricity where previously gas provided the bulk of the domestic services.鈥�
Goaded into action by the unsporting determination of the 鈥渆lectrical friends鈥� to exploit their competitive advantage, the gas fightback began with a small Southampton company called Attaix. In the late 1920s it was selling a device called the Thermattaix based on the thermoelectric effect: the generation of electricity in a circuit made of wires of different metals in which the junctions between those metals are maintained at different temperatures. The greater the temperature difference, the higher the voltage generated.
The Thermattaix built up a usable voltage by connecting a large number of compound metal strips in series. The strips were housed in a drum some 25 centimetres in diameter and of similar height. Waste heat from the gas jets that warmed the hot junctions escaped through holes in the lid.
As the company literature carefully explained: 鈥淭he output of THERMATTAIX is comparatively small in Amperes, but more than sufficient to operate any modern wireless set employing modern valves of low consumption.鈥� The gas consumed in heating the junctions was hardly going to earn the companies a fortune. But that didn鈥檛 matter. What counted was the chance to use electrical devices in the home without the acid-slopping inconvenience of accumulators and, most importantly, without giving those carpetbaggers from the electricity companies a foot in the door.
The next and obvious step-to put a thermoelectric generator inside the same cabinet as the radio-was a few years coming. But by 1939 the fully integrated, gas-powered radio had arrived. The editor of the Gas Journal allowed himself a smidgen of triumph. 鈥淭he term 鈥榓ll-mains鈥� wireless set . . . no longer has quite the same significance; for in future it can refer equally well to gas mains as to electrical mains.鈥�
And this was thanks to the efforts of Henry Milnes of Milnes Electrical Engineering Company. His radios were about a metre tall, with the tuning equipment and speaker occupying the top part of the cabinet and the thermoelectric generator the lower section. This compartment was lined with asbestos sheeting as a precaution against fire. To turn on the set you lit the gas burners using a flash ignition device activated by the knob that also controlled the sound volume.
The sets sold for around 拢15 (this was 1939, remember, when 拢5 was a good weekly wage) with running costs estimated at around half that of radios using rechargeable accumulators. Gas was rising to the challenge. No wonder the Gas Journal felt sufficiently confident to take a gentle swipe at the opposition. The new radio, it enthused, will bring the cost within the means of those for whom it鈥檚 intended: 鈥渢hose who are occupying all-gas houses and who are especially susceptible to the 鈥榓ll-mains鈥� sales talk of our electrical competitors鈥�.
As if to clinch the argument, the article drew attention to a modest bonus available to users of the gas-powered radio. 鈥淭he amount of heat given off by the set is roughly equivalent to that of two small incandescent lights. This is a useful factor in assisting to warm the room.鈥�
Radios may have been in the forefront of the gas industry鈥檚 doomed struggle against electricity, but they weren鈥檛 the only domestic appliances trotted out in the forlorn attempt to curb progress. There were gas versions of the washing machine, the dishwasher and the gramophone. The 1920s saw a gas-powered vacuum cleaner. It seems to have relied on burning gas in its main chamber, then cooling whatever products of combustion remained with a spray of water from a tank built into the apparatus. This produced the partial vacuum which gave the instrument its sucking power.
For obvious reasons, gas companies were happy to display the new equipment. But even enthusiasts could hardly have described the gas radio as a must-have household appliance. Truth to tell, it was a big flop. One retired salesman told Historic Gas Times (the newsletter for all gas enthusiasts) that while he had gas radios in the showroom, he only remembered selling one.
Milnes emigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s, miffed, so he claimed, by the government bureaucracy that was interfering with his business. But the truth was that trying to power radios by gas had as much chance of succeeding then as we would have today if we tried reintroducing steam engines to drive aeroplanes.