Gasworks
industrial plant for the production of flammable gas
A gasworks or gas house is fundamentally a scalable (by output quantity) flammable gas producer/generator whose size depends on the scale of the gas distribution system it supports.
Coal-based town gas production was generally displaced by petroleum-based gas and natural gas. However, Great Britain continued her use of coal-based town gas until the North Sea natural gas discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these have been made redundant in the developed world by the use of natural gas, though they are still used for storage space.
Type
Remote uses
Gasworks for industrial districts and remote locations
Gasworks, specifically for Mond gas, made low-quality gas (which was sold at low cost) on a massive scale for industrial districts. They used cheap coal slack and recovered ammonia as a byproduct, then piped the low-quality gas to nearby factories. It was a "centralized" version of a "remote" technology.
Early gasworks
Gasified coal was introduced to Great Britain in the 1790s as an illuminating gas by the Scottish inventor William Murdoch.
Early gasworks were usually located beside a river or canal so that coal could be brought in by barge. Transport was later shifted to railways and many gasworks had internal railway systems with their own locomotives.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gasworks” is industrial plant for the production of flammable gas. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gasworks, industrial and plant, not as a finished interpretation.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1495738. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gasworks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.