`Wooden gas distribution pipes`

Why did they want to do it? They wanted to have street lights. It was dark in downtown Boston at night, and there were muggers. The first thing they did, they just took wooden logs and they gun-drilled them. Gun drilling — has anyone ever drilled a deep hole in a piece of metal and found the drill is not stiff enough and it tends to walk in one corner and you end up not drilling straight down? You actually come out the side because the thing bends. We can get around that by gun drilling. They call it gun drilling because that's how they made rifle barrels in the old days. If you spin the thing you want to drill the hole in opposite to the direction you spin the drill, you actually can get a nice straight cut and it'll go much deeper. You can make a longer barrel.

Brief reference to the historical practice of conveying gas through hollowed wood trunks. Used to set up the combustible-material-in-permeable-container problem.

In addition to conveying water, another example is conveying gas. The image up here is wood. Years ago they used to hollow out wood trunks, and gas would be transferred inside. Who can think of some issues with wood over time and having a combustible material flowing through it? But in the 1800s, when they were first getting things started, that was a main issue.