Hatchard

 

When I started writing notes on historic gas works I intended to start at the earliest and work forward. I have been thwarted in this because interesting things have kept coming along and so I have written about them instead.  This time I intend to start with the earliest coal gas making plant which I know about. It was an experimental plant in London where coal gas for lighting was made three years before Murdoch's Redruth demonstrations.

There were many experiments with the manufacture of coal gas in the late 1700s but no-one patented the process.  By the 1800s there was big money to be made from gas lighting and this was why Murdoch's claim to have been the first 'inventor' of gas emerged. Murdoch had powerful backers who were prepared to invest in a large scale lobbying exercise while other 'inventors' were not so easily able to make their claims known. 

This story is about a Mr. Hatchard who had found out about coal gas in the 1780s through a connection with the Earl of Dundonald (another 'first' inventor of gas). In 1789 Hatchard's next door neighbour was John Champion, one of the Bristol brass making family. He was in his 80s and had retired to London. They lived in Warwick Row in what is now the area around Victoria Station. In Hatchard's back garden they set up 'a fire place and chimney' and 'placed an iron pot .. attached a tin cylinder .. the smoke when lighted produced a column of bright flame'.

They tried to interest Trinity House in what they had done, knowing an improve light for lighthouses was needed. A delegation of Elder Brethren came to see this 'light by means of vapour issuing from coal' but the idea was not taken up. Champion went on to contact Matthew Boulton, William Murdoch's employer. They met to discuss the matter but Boulton appeared not to be interested. That was the end of the matter. Champion died and Hatchard .. well I don't know  .. he might have become an undertaker, or a bookseller, or something else like that.

I have often wondered if this story is true - but it is backed by some incontestable contemporary archive evidence.  I am not pretending to be the first historian to have discovered Mr. Hatchard but I am not aware that anyone else has asked who he was and what he was up to. Family history research has led me to a possible connection with the Sugg family. The Suggs - still in business today - boast that they have made gas fittings since the earliest days of the London industry.  This makes me think that there must be something more to this story than a simple tale of an unrecognised inventor. Powerful interests - the Champions, Boulton and Watt, probably Sugg (and by implication Winsor and the Gas Light and Coke Co.) either knew about Mr. Hatchard and silenced him, or knew that he was a liar.

This account is very abbreviated one (a longer version appeared in Historic Gas Times No. 8 August 1996).  I would be very happy to write it up as a 'proper' article if anyone would care to commission me (with all the references in place).  It raises a lot of interesting issues - about the links between industrialists and inventors and the way that knowledge was developed and processed, about why we (and the late Victorians) need to identify and mythologise 'inventors'.  It is also, probably, about lies and skullduggery.

I am glad, though, that we can now firmly set the first demonstration of gas lighting in London.

Mary Mills