Wooden gas distribution pipes

1880s Boston street-light gas distribution used drilled-out tree trunks with mastic joints. Tom has seen them dug up.

Plastic is replacing a lot of things. This is just simple polyethylene, but it's gas pipe. We used to make the pipe out of steel. Before we made it out of steel, we made the pipes out of wood. We used to take trees and drill them out and bury them in the ground and put some mastic around the joints, and that's how they transported the gas to make the street lights, in the 1880s. I've seen old wooden pipes that were dug out of the ground in Boston that were part of the old street light system of 150 years ago. Now we're going to plastic. And plastic — there are so many plastics that you need a whole course just to talk about all the different plastics.

Historical artifact, gun-drilled tree trunk used for street-light gas distribution. Tom has seen these excavated by Boston Gas / National Grid in Norwood.

If you're going to convey gas, in the old days we started with a wooden pipe. [Tom indicates a wooden gas pipe from 1840.] That is a wooden pipe from 1840. They would take an old tree and gun-drill the inside, lay it in the ground, and transport gas from whatever their source was. Originally most of this was for the utilities, for street lights in the cities. When it was called Boston Gas — now it's National Grid — I've been down to their training facility in Norwood, and they have examples where they're digging in the ground and they find one of these old wooden pipes from the gas lines from the 1800s. Or one of the cast-iron pipes.

Foreshadowed at end of lecture as "tomorrow's story" — Boston's first gas pipes were wood. The setup for the next lecture.

From lead pipe of 300 years ago, to galvanized pipe of a hundred years ago, to copper pipe of 60 or 70 years ago, to plastic pipe for the last 20 years — tremendous change in the materials we used. From clay pipe and concrete aqueducts that we used for thousands of years. I'm going to give you another example tomorrow of what we've done for gas piping. Just to give you a hint, anybody know the first gas piping in the streets of Boston, what material they used? Wood. Yep. I'll tell you that story tomorrow. Thanks.