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THE BEST LIGHTING FOR COUNTRY HOUSES:
SOME FACTS ABOUT ACETYLENE GAS
VERY owner of a country home
      understands the difficulties involved
      in getting just the right system of
      lighting for that home,-a system
that will be safe, clean, economical, that
will give ample light of a good quality in
such form that it may be used throughout
the house as conveniently as gas and elec-
tricity are used, and that may be generated
in an individual plant that shall not cost
a sum prohibitive to a man of moderate
means.
  Where the country home is sufficiently
close to a town or village to permit its
sharing in the benefits of the municipal
electric or gas plant, this problem of
course does not exist, or at any rate is not
specially pressing, but where the house in
question is out in the open country or in a
district so thinly settled that no effort has
ever been made to install such a central
lighting plant, the owner hitherto has been
forced to depend for the most part upon
the good old-fashioned kerosene lamp,
unless he happened to be near enough to
a trolley line to be able to run out a wire
and tap a little of the electricity generated
in its power house.
  The one practicable alternative to either
expensive or inadequate lighting was prac-
tically unknown until within the past six
years. We refer to acetylene gas. Al-
though the existence of this gas was dis-
covered in 1836 by Edmund Davy, an
English chemist who stumbled upon it
accidentally while endeavoring to produce
metallic potassium, he observed it merely
as a rather remarkable by-product which
was capable of decomposing water, with
the evolution of a gas which contained
acetylene. As chemistry is full of such
accidental discoveries, nothing was done
with this until 1862, when Woehler, the
most famous chemist of his day, an-
nounced the discovery of the preparation
of acetylene from calcium carbide, which
he had made by heating to a very high
temperature a mixture of charcoal with
some alloy of zinc and calcium. Woehler
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pointed out that this new gas burned with
a brilliant but very smoky flame, and the
new compounds were extensively studied
and described by Berthelot in the same
year.
  Then for nearly thirty years these
two substances were practically forgotten.
During all this time acetylene was pro-
curable only by the tedious methods which
the early discoverers had used, with the
result that even its name was known only
to students of science, and it is perfectly
safe to say that, up to 1892, few even of
the professional chemists of the world ever
saw an acetylene flame, much less dreamed
of it as a commercial possibility.
  But the laws governing the formation of
acetylene were revealed as a consequence
of the development of the modern electric
furnace, which places in the hands of the
investigator a means of bringing about,
through intense heat, chemical changes
never before known. Experiments were
set on foot by Thomas L. Willson, an elec-
trical engineer, at Spray, in North Caro-
lina, which revealed the possibilities of
calcium carbide as a commercial product.
The discovery came through accident, as
so many great discoveries do, but the acci-
dent led to the development of an artificial
light more like sunshine than any that has
as yet become known.
  It was too tempting a field to remain
unexploited, and many inventors rushed
into it with only half-knowledge of its
properties and very little understanding of
the right way to handle it. The result was
that acetylene got rather a bad name for
being a dangerous compound that was
liable to explode under very slight provo-
cation, and that distanced ordinary illumi-
nating gas both as to smell and asphyxiat-
ing qualities. Also, its production was so
expensive that many people felt that they
could not afford it, apparent as were the
advantages of having a private gas plant
in the cellar of one's country home.
  But all that has been changed now.
Both the production of the gas and the