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Show FOOLING WITH NATURAL GAS. Hills and Plains Lighted by Wasted Fuel and Merchants ' Advertising With It. Pittsburg, January " 4. People fool with natural gas and waste it here in a manner quite picturesque, but indicating at the same time that they either don't know just what to do with it or have got a great deal more than they can make useful. If you take the 9 :15 o'clock a. m. train from New York for Pittsburg on any day you will find the darkness after sundown relieved, by frequent plunges alongside of long rows of flaming things that look like boiler furnaces, with holes in the top in place of chimneys, so that you see the white hot fire where the door? ought to be, and great leaping red and white flames where the smoke-stack belongs. be-longs. These are coke ovens, or furnaces, fur-naces, in which bituminous rnal ia rn- duced to-coke, and very beautiful and surprising things they are when seen by the hundred, in long lines and Indian file, on a pitch black night and in a region re-gion where, in some cases, no villages or houses or buildings of any sort appear. In the heart of this luminous coke-oven country you suddenly shoot past a great cloud of flame in the sky a flame as big as a house, and shaped now like a ham, and next like a huge conical seashell. For half a mile more around it the country, coun-try, is brilliantly lighted, and men and fences and sheds and flying birds cast jet black shadows on the grass. At a second glance the vast cloud of flame is seen to be poised on a slender black pole twenty feet high.- It takes a moment's study to bring a realization that the pole is an ordinary house-service gas pipe, and that the swaying, rolling cloud of fire is a flame of natural gas. If the cars would stop just there for a moment you would hear that burning gas roar and rumble and hiss with almost exactly the noise of a good-sized cataract. A great, yellowish white speck, low down in the distant horizon ahead, is the first sign one sees of Pittsburg. That speck is a flame forty or fifty feet long and half as wide. It is the advertisement of a gentleman's furnishing goods store on Smithfield street, the Broadway of Pittsburg. The enterprising brothers who keep the store had a figure of "Liberty "Lib-erty Enjightening the World" in the corner of their great new building, and when natural gas invaded the city thev took the cumbersome Bartholdian imitation imita-tion of a firebrand out of her hand, substituted sub-stituted twenty feet of gas pipe for it, tapped the main in the middle of the street, and now they send a man up a ladder every night, and he lights a match and raises it to the pipe and bang ! a section of the city is lighted as no electric light ever began to light any part of outdoors. out-doors. And there over the city this great balloon-shaped blaze sways and pulsates in the wind all night, roaring like a giant's furnace. Just so the river-side is illuminated by two great flames that jet from ordinary little tubes sticking out of the side of Du Quesne Heights. It is wonderful to see the wind catch one of these masses of flame and wrestle with it and bear it down and roll it over and bite great yellow yel-low and white pieces from it and fling them away, patches of fire that look as if they were going to float along and keep their shape awhile, as whiffs of steam do, but instantly they are gone. This natural gas carries no . odor with it. You. cannot detect its presence even when the air is laden with it. It leaks from the mains in the Pittsburg streets, and, finding a vein of sand, penetrates to the cellars of near houses. Several times it has happened that a resident has gone down in the cellar of his house to look for something, has lighted a match there, and has seemed to become the centre of a convulsion of nature that has wrecked all the windows, cracked the walls, and blown the doors off their hinges. In some of the mills and in the lot where the new jail is going up the gas jets burn forever. There is at least one town or city in this region wherein the street lights are never put out, because it would, be a waste of money to hire a lamplighter after the original lighting. , This new fuel is valued in manufactures because of the intensity and evenness of its heating properties. One manufacturer said that in his opinion it will presently I double the wealth-producing power of the industries in and near Pittsburg by improving the quality of every product in the development of which heat plays a part. For use in dwellings and offices it seems equally desirable. I only saw it in use in one house. There I saw it in an ordinary cylindrical stove. A pipe emptied the gas in at the bottom of the stove, where it used to be customary to keep the ash-pan. At first, when the owner turned on his new fuel and dropped a match in at the stove door, the top lid was shot into the ceiling, the door flew across the room, and the dampers blew out. He is an ingenious in-genious person. He got a lot of bricks, broke each one in two, put the half bricks in the stove so that they looked like big coals, turned on the gas, and chuckled to see how, as he expressed it, he had "fooled the stove into thinking he had returned to the old-fashioned way of getting get-ting heat." It fooled me also, for when the gas has been lighted in the stove for a few minutes the bricks become red-hot and look precisely like coals. |