Historic Gas Prices

by John Davies, the Hitchin Society

Whilst considering the beauty and colour which is provided during the hours of daylight by a well-managed garden, it is now that we pause to consider how dark and dingy the interior of a 19th century house was after dark. Some of us can still remember the gas street lamps in Hitchin. I can remember a house in Hitchin in the 1960s that had never had electricity installed. Hitchin’s original gasworks at Starlings Bridge, with its frontage still standing today, was built in 1834, but gas was not, for the early Victorians, a cheaper alternative to candles or oil lamps.

Gas was made on a very small scale and was then a “premium” source of energy used almost entirely for lighting – and very inefficiently at that.

It is perhaps a little difficult to compare gas prices with today’s values as different units were then used to express prices at different times. The 1835 prices are quoted in shillings per 1,000 cu. ft. of gas, while by the 1920s the unit had become the “therm”. Today gas is sold by the kilowatt hour (kWh) – in the same way as electricity.

In order to compare prices, the historic units are converted into kWh, and the shillings and pence into decimal money.

The 1835 price is quoted as 14s per 1,000 cu. ft., falling later to 12s 6d per 1,000 cu. ft. To convert these volumetric units into energy units it is necessary to assume a calorific value of the gas. Coal gas is generally quoted as 500 BTU/cu.ft. and a check calculation shows this to be about right allowing for some non-combustible impurities. A therm is 100,000 BTUs and therefore the 1835 price is 2s 10d per therm falling to 2s 6d per therm.

This enables a direct comparison to be made with the 1932 price of 9d per therm.

Converting these prices to new pence per kWh gives the following results in period money with no allowance for inflation:

1835	0.48p / kWh falling to 0.43 / kWh
1932	0.13p / kWh
2003	Between 2.04p / kWh and 1.42p / kWh depending on quantity used.

Once an allowance is made for inflation, we can see just how expensive gas was in 1835. Given that the stoker/lamplighter was paid 14s per week, that indicates an hourly rate of perhaps 3.5 old pence per hour, or 1.45 new pence per hour. Someone doing that type of work today would presumably be paid around £7.50 per hour, so wage inflation is of the order of 500 fold (in percentage terms 50,000%!).

Wage inflation of course includes a massive increase in the standard of living – the 1835 stoker could not imagine many of the things even a relatively low-income employee can today take for granted. Without better data on cost of living, perhaps a factor of 100 might be right for everyday items. If so, the 1835 price of gas would be 48p / kWh in 2003 money values or over 30 times more expensive in real terms than today – no wonder gas was only used for lighting.

Until the 1860s, gas lighting depended on the direct burning of gas as a smoky yellow flame. It was only when Bunsen of the University of Heidelberg introduced air into the gas to give an intensely hot, non-luminous flame, and a thorium oxide mantle was introduced to glow white hot, that an efficient form of gas lighting became available. Within 30 years or so, electric lighting was already on the way.

Hitchin Journal, Autumn 2003

This page was last updated 6 March 2007