Boston wooden gas pipes (1880s street light system)

Coal-gas streetlight infrastructure in 1800s cities. Logs were gun-drilled, mudded into the ground with oakum. Boston excavation work still occasionally uncovers these.

People wanted that, particularly as they got bigger cities in the 1800s, because they could use it for streetlights. Except you had to pipe the gas from the coal gas generator to the lights down the street. And the first material they used for the pipes was — anybody know? It was wood. They would take logs and gun-drill them out. What's a gun drill? Ordinarily, if you had a lathe, you'd have the drill stationary and the piece spinning. In a gun drill you spin the drill opposite to the direction you're spinning the wood or the metal. They call it a gun drill because that way you can get very straight holes. If you try to drill a long hole with a metal drill in a piece of metal like a gun barrel, it will always walk to one side, and you won't get a hole more than twelve inches deep. But if both are counter-rotating — this is an important trick — can you counter-rotate? Most people will rotate in the same direction. I spent my senior year of high school doing this in class, because I was bored, and I can do figure eights in opposite directions, but it took me a year of practice. With a gun drill, you can drill long holes.

Earliest Boston gas distribution: gun-drilled logs, ~6-inch diameter with 2-inch bore, used for street-light gas. Eventually replaced by cast iron.

Here are some pictures of things they dig up out of the Boston street. These are old gas pipes that were abandoned in the ground. This is just a cast iron sleeve with two pipes, and the whole thing is filled with oakum. This is a bell-and-spigot joint, also filled with oakum — they just stuff some old rope and tar in there.

Student: What about lead-sealed joints?

That didn't come along until around 1900, 1910. I've worked on water pipes that are lead-sealed that failed 90 years later. These were 1880s-type stuff. I wish I had taken a picture when I was down there — they had one that was even older, a wooden pipe. They'd just take a log. The original street lights — in order to pipe the gas down the street, they would take a log, gun-drill it, and put a hole in it. It might be a 6-inch diameter log with a 2-inch hole in it. You just hope it wouldn't rot away. They finally went to cast iron, and the cast iron lasts for a long time. Not that it doesn't leak at the joints, but that's another story.