New Flame: How Gas Changed the Commercial, Domestic and Industrial Life of Britain between 1813 and 1984 by Hugh Barty-King

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 295 modern ones), concrete evidence about earlier animal husbandry has been hard to come by. Even farming manuals, which are not neces­ sarily an accurate indication of the practices of actual farmers, were scarce before the 18th century, and records of the size, appearance, and ancestry of individual animals were rarer still. Nevertheless, Rus­ sell has been able to glean sufficient information from such sources as the account books of farms and estates, sales records of the wool trade, and the breeding records of a few aristocratic studs, to construct a plausible picture of early modern livestock, although one that prob­ ably presents the animals owned by wealthy landlords more accurately than those owned by more modest farmers. In addition, since he approaches his material from a technical as well as a historical persective, Russell is able to theorize about why many 18th-century livestock breeds were less revolutionary than they seemed. To put it crudely, he argues that without careful distinction between phenotypic and genotypic characteristics (a kind of distinc­ tion that neither the state of science nor the philosophical inclinations of animal breeders made possible in the 18th century), the careful keeping of pedigrees that was a prized innovation of improved hus­ bandry acts mainly to make a political point about the legitimacy of the human aristocracy. Harriet Ritvo Dr. Ritvo is associate professor in the Humanities Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). New Flame: How Gas Changed the Commercial, Domestic and Industrial Life of Britain between 1813 and 1984. By Hugh Barty-King. Tavistock, Devon: Graphmitre, 1984. Pp. 262; illustrations, appendixes, bib­ liography. £11.50. New Flame is a history of the town gas industry in Britain from its beginnings in the early 19th century to the present day. It is written in a jaunty, journalistic, anecdotal style that makes it a “good read,” and it could have been useful as a starting point for serious study if it had been documented in any commonly accepted way. It is difficult to find the author’s authority for many of his assertions because the “bibliography” is just a string of titles. The illustrations are good, but only a few are referred to in a list of acknowledgments. There is no index. Much of the blame for the book’s defects must be laid at the door of the publisher, who should not have let a book go to press without checking makeup. Still, one has to wonder how the author, who must have had his material in some order to be able to write this free- 296 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE flowing narrative, could have been satisfied with what came back to him in proof. The text loses its grip around the 1930s, and the coverage of the introduction of North Sea gas into Britain and the remarkable “con­ version” operation (that unique example of the cooperation ofa whole nation in a technical transformation) is quite inadequate. One must go to Trevor Williams’s A History of the British Gas Industry (Oxford, 1981) and the excellent official accounts by the British Gas Corpo­ ration for that story. All the same, anyone approaching the history of gas in Britain for the first time could do worse than read this book at bedtime. He will at least start his serious work aware that the history of gas is a tale of ordinary people and their problems—not just of managers and money. Frank Greenaway Dr. Greenaway was formerly a keeper and administrator at the London Science Museum. City Lights: The Establishment of the First Swedish Gasworks. By Arne Kaijser. Linkôping: Dept. of Technology and Social Change, Lin­ kôping University, 1986. Pp. 267; illustrations, tables, notes, bibli­ ography. Skr 142.00 (paper). Arne Kaijser, a graduate engineer at the Department ofTechnology and Social Change at Linkôping University, has defended a doctoral thesis he calls City Lights: The Establishment ofthe First Swedish Gasworks. Kaijser claims, with justification, that gas-based technology is often overlooked in international literature dealing with the history of tech...