Original guide
The books that taught gas lighting
Before electric lamps took the street, English and American cities learned lighting from gas-works manuals, burner catalogs, and illuminating-gas textbooks.
Manufactured gas — coal gas, water gas, producer gas — was a chemical and civil-engineering trade. The books explain retorts, purifiers, holders, street mains, meters, and the politics of municipal lighting. Later volumes add natural gas as a field fuel and a city supply. Those texts are technical history: they show how gas and electricity competed for the same rooms and the same streets.
Library of Congress records for “illuminating gas,” “gas lighting,” “gas manufacture,” and “gas engines” still surface PDF scans of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century manuals. Many pre-1931 titles are public domain in the United States. Modern utility reports, API manuals, and safety codes are not, even when a PDF is easy to find.
VoltGas keeps gas lighting, gas manufacture, gas engines, and natural gas as separate shelves so a reader looking for burner practice does not land in a dynamo textbook. When a title is uploaded, the description should say what the book actually teaches — candlepower, calorific value, engine timing — not a copied library abstract.