Plants Changed 19th-Century Life : Technology: Manufactured gas brought convenient lighting, heating in era before electricity.

In their day, starting in the early 1800s on the East Coast and making their way west in the latter part of the century, the so-called towne gas plants were the wonder that thrust a growing nation into the modern era.

Almost overnight, a human burden--that of creating, carrying and cleaning up the fires that heated homes and lit lanterns--was extinguished. A magical new substance, carried to residents via special subterranean pipes, seemed to perform those chores automatically. A match was all it took.

Flip on the gas flow to the tall new lampposts and streets shone bright against a night sky. Turn a knob and supper sizzled on the stove. Lift a lever and a home was heated against a winter chill.

And with what must have seemed like a step closer to divinity, adjust a switch on a living room table lamp, and then there was light.

Any town that was any town had its own plant. Bigger cities had more than one. A large hotel or hospital could command its own gas-making facility.

“Manufactured gas basically was the start of night life,” said Lori Traweek, an environmental engineer with the American Gas Assn. “It created the ability for people to at night have a life. You could walk the streets, you could read more comfortably, you could heat your home without sitting around the fireplace with blankets.”

Lampblack, a black sooty gas plant residue, was the byproduct of the miracle.

The plants began in the pre-electricity days before natural gas could be extracted from the ground, when English inventors developed a technique for heating coal into a gas. The manufactured gas plants were also known as towne gas plants because hundreds of them dotted the nation to serve the burgeoning cities.

The first Los Angeles plant was built on Olvera Street in 1867, records show. At the early East Coast coal gas plants, tar was the most prevalent waste. At the oil gas plants, most prevalent in the West, the most voluminous byproduct was lampblack.

Dried lampblack itself was generally used as fuel and hauled away to help power the works. Tar residues were often sold for use on roofs and asphalt. And until they were put to other uses, the wastes were stored in giant earthen pits.

Often, when the plants were decommissioned in favor of natural gas, in the ground is where those byproducts stayed.

“In some sites, they buried some residue they couldn’t or didn’t need,” said Don Johnson, of the Department of Toxic Substances Control, who oversees the Southern California cleanup efforts. “In other sites, they spread the lampblack out evenly and covered it with topsoil. It varied site to site.”

In time, natural gas supplanted the man-made variety and electricity lit the cities.

Manufactured gas was all but defunct by the end of World War II, when the operations became valued because of their pipelines to the residences more than for the plants themselves. Competing utilities, including electric and natural gas companies, often bought the plants in order to shut them down.