Mr. Frank Livesey, in the concluding sentence of a paper read before
the Southern District Association of Gas Managers and Engineers during
the past month, on "A Ready Means of Enriching Coal Gas," speaking of
enrichment by gasolene by the Maxim-Clarke process, said "it should,
in many cases, take the place of cannel, to be replaced in its turn,
probably, by a water gas carbureted to 20 or 25 candle power." And
now, having fully reviewed the methods either in use or proposed for
the enrichment of gas, we will pass on to this, the probable cannel of
the future.
Discovered by Fontana, in 1780, and first worked by Ibbetson, in
England, in 1824, water gas has added a voluminous chapter to the
patent records of England, France, and America, no less than sixty
patents being taken out between 1824 and 1858, in which the action of
steam on incandescent carbon was the basis for the production of an
inflammable gas.
Up to the latter date the attempts to make and utilize water gas all
met with failure; but about this time the subject began to be taken up
in America, and the principle of the regenerator, enunciated by
Siemens in 1856, having been pressed into service in the water-gas
generator under the name of fixing chambers or superheaters, we find
water gas gradually approaching the successful development to which it
has attained in the United States during the last ten years. Having
now, by the aid of American skill, been brought into practical form,
it is once more attempting to gain a foothold in Western Europe--the
land of its birth.
When carbon is acted upon at high temperatures by steam, the first
action which takes place is the decomposition of the water vapor, the
hydrogen being liberated, while the oxygen unites with the carbon to
form carbon dioxide:
Carbon. Water.
C + 2H2O = CO2 + 4H2
And the carbon dioxide so produced interacts with more red-hot carbon,
forming the lower oxide--carbon monoxide: