50 Laurel Street, Philadelphia PA 19123
(south side between Canal and Front Street)
© Roy E. Goodman and David G.
Orr, Ph.D., Workshop of the World (Oliver Evans Press,
1990).
The company was organized
under an ordinance of the District of the Northern
Liberties in 1838, with an authorized capital of
$100,000, divided into shares of $50 each. In 1844 it was
incorporated with its capital stock limited to $200,000.
Its purpose was to ‘construct and maintain suitable
works for the manufacture of high carburetted hydrogen
gas from bituminous coal and other substances, for the
purpose of public and private illumination in the
district of the Northern Liberties, or in streets
dividing that district from those opposite.’
1
This plant is noteworthy because it was the first to
extract gas from native supplies of bituminous coal along
the Monongahela, Ohio, and Allegheny rivers.
Inventor Joseph Battin was appointed superintendent of
the Gas Works, by the Board of Managers of Northern
Liberties in 1841. He contributed much to gas technology
by perfecting a machine for breaking and screening coal
in his own shop near the gas works. Battin obtained the
first U.S. patent granted for a ‘coal-breaking
machine’ in 1843. Further refinements on the
breaker caused Pennsylvania coal land operators to sign
lucrative agreements with him.
Northern Liberties remained the only private gas company
after the 1854 Consolidation of the municipalities in
Philadelphia County.
It operated until 1956 when the Philadelphia Gas Works
absorbed it.
1 James Goodman,
compiler. A
Digest of the Acts of Assembly...of the Northern
Liberties. (Philadelphia, 1853), pp.
118-127, esp. p. 125. See also Edward Pinkowski,
"Joseph
Battin: Father of the Coal Breaker,"
Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 73, pp. 337-340.
Update May
2007 (by
Torben Jenk):
Demolished.
See
also:
Hexamer General Survey #2579 (1892)
"Northern Liberties Gas Co.'s Works."