When Pipelines Grew on Trees

Lloyd Gillespie was on the hunt for a gas leak.  The year was 1977 and he had been dispatched to River Forest, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago and home to two universities and the old stomping grounds of luminaries like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway.  The Northern Illinois Gas Company crew that Gillespie worked for was digging up old cast iron gas pipe — often in such deteriorated condition it crumbled to the touch — to replace with more modern and corrosion-resistant lines.

Down in the trenches, the young laborer struck something hard — something made of wood. It wasn’t totally unusual to hit tree roots or old construction debris, so he ignored it at first, until he struck it again a few feet away.  As the covering dirt was cleared away, the older crew members started getting excited.  They had uncovered a six-foot section of wooden pipe and, judging by the tar coating and the joints at both ends, it was clearly part of some of the oldest gas lines in Chicago.

Technically this wasn’t the first time Gillespie had encountered such a thing; it had happened twice before.  Both times, though, what he’d found had been little more than a few rotting shreds of wood barely recognizable as pipe.  This line was in far better condition.  After some discussion, a piece of the find was mounted on a plaque and presented to the vice president of Northern Illinois Gas, who figured the line had been installed about 1903.  Gillespie also managed to save a piece as his own souvenir of work in the field, which still holds a place of pride in his home today.

Even 45 years ago, such a discovery seemed a bit puzzling.  Who would try and run gas through a wooden pipe?  Prone to warping, rotting, and cracking (not to mention burning), wood hardly seems like the safest material to transport flammable gas over long distances.  And it’s not — gas pipe has gone through several changes of increasingly safer material construction over the last century and a half, but as with all modern technologies, it had to start somewhere.

The Dawn of the Gas Age
The first widespread commercial use for natural gas came in the form of gas lighting for street lamps.  Invented in London in the 1790s by William Murdoch, the first lights used coal gas made from the distillation of coal, chosen from several candidate gases because it gave the brightest light.  In 1807, Pall Mall in London became the first street in the world lit by gas.  The idea quickly jumped the pond, with Baltimore becoming the first city in America to install gas streetlights in 1816 — four years before they debuted in Paris, the “City of Lights.”  Pipelines carried gas to each lamppost along the street, where lamplighters would light them every evening and douse them the next morning.

In 1821, Fredonia, New York, saw the first successful natural gas well when William Hart noticed gas bubbles rising to the surface of Canada way Creek along the south shore of Lake Erie, where Native Americans had been lighting gases seeping from the shale outcrops for centuries.  Hart’s crew dug a 27-foot-deep hole with shovels to try to increase the flow.  A pipe made from hollowed out logs coated with tar and rags delivered the captured gas to a nearby customer, who also purchased 30 burners to put it to use.  Today Hart is considered “the father of natural gas.”

Two years later and a few miles south along the Erie lakeshore in Westfield, New York, another wooden pipe made of pine logs was run from the shale outcrops to the Barcelona Harbor lighthouse.  A few other gas discoveries were known to have used wooden pipelines in the Appalachian basin around that time as well.

In 1836, the Philadelphia Gas Works opened as the first municipally owned gas distribution company (still the largest and oldest of its kind today) to fuel its streetlights.  By 1841, cities as far-flung as Sydney, Australia, were installing their first gas lights, and using wooden pipes to supply them.  In Chicago, the Chicago Gas Light & Coke Co. began selling gas for lighting in 1850, and on August 21, 1858, the Ottawa Gas Light and Coke Company provided light for the first of the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates in nearby Ottawa, Illinois.

Also in 1858, a group of entrepreneurs would expand on William Hart’s work to found the Fredonia Gas Light Company, the first private natural gas distribution company.  The very next year, and a bit farther still down the south shore of Lake Erie, ‘Colonel’ Edwin Drake famously dug a well using an innovative iron pipe drive and struck oil and gas at a depth of just 69 feet for the Seneca Oil Company.  A two-inch diameter pipeline was built to transport the gas five-and-a-half miles to the town of Titusville, Pennsylvania, proving that natural gas could be moved relatively safely and easily from its underground source to a paying customer.  This was an important first step in replacing inefficient coal gas as the main source of light in modern cities.

Wooden Pipe Construction
Pipe construction in those early days was clearly not a standard affair.  A coating of tar and cloth for sealant seems to be the most common element.  The longer cross-country pipes at early sites like Fredonia (1821) were literally hollowed out tree trunks butted together end to end.  Images of the 12-inch diameter pipe from Sydney, Australia (1841), show a barrel-like construction made of staves in the cross section, probably held together by iron hoops. 

Lloyd Gillespie described the circa-1903 pipe he uncovered in River Forest as a solid piece of wood about eight or nine in outer diameter.  An inner channel with a diameter varying anywhere from three to five inches appeared to have been burned out.  The ends of the segment were butted square joints joined by a metal band.  Gillespie believes this was likely a “gas main” at the time that would have branched off into still smaller distribution lines running to houses and street lamps.

A smaller diameter pipe likely dating to 1902 found by Tom Shepstone in Pennsylvania shows a clean, round outer casing with a neatly bored inner shaft that looks much more uniform than the pipe Gillespie found.  It also had metal bands around the ends and what look like male-female joints in an accompanying video.

While this wild variation in quality is clearly appalling to any modern engineer, it’s worth remembering that the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which sets standards for all manner of construction materials in the U.S., didn’t even exist in its earliest form until after World War I.  Even for the highest quality of equipment and materials in the first century of the industrial revolution, standardization of design was a long way from reality.  Building a pipeline to stretch miles across the countryside was up to the raw creativity of the driller and the availability of local materials in the earliest days, until the gas supply became sufficient to demand the need for a piping industry.

The Slow Replacement of Wood
The irony of the wooden pipeline era is that metal pipe-making technology had already been around for millennia.  Ancient Egyptians had made metal pipes from copper as far back as 3000 B.C.E., and the word “plumbing” itself comes from plumbum, the Latin word for the lead they made their pipes out of.  Cannons began their existence as simple cast-iron tubes in the 14th century, and of course guns required the manufacture of a finely-tooled metal barrel.  In fact, William Murdoch, the aforementioned inventor of gas lighting, tried using metal pipe made from the barrels of discarded muskets joined together to distribute gas in his earliest systems.

In 1824, Englishman James Russell rose to the demand of the new gaslight industry by inventing the first manufacturing process for steel tubing involving a drop hammer and a rolling mill.  His process was almost immediately surpassed in 1825 by Comenius Whitehouse’s invention of butt-welding, which drew hot sheets of iron through a cone-shaped outlet to form a tube that was welded at the ends.  Philadelphia opened its first pipe manufacturing plant using Whitehouse’s process in 1832—four years before the formation of the Philadelphia Gas Works.  Both methods generated a pipe with a welded seam, however, which was more likely to fail and leak.  In the 1840s metalworkers began experimenting with drilling through a solid steel billet to create seamless pipes, but this proved inefficient and inconsistent until a better process was found in 1888 to cast a billet around a fireproof brick core.  Meanwhile, the discovery of the Bessemer process in 1847 significantly increased the volume and efficiency of steel production in general.

So if steel pipe existed, and gaslight and steam power created a viable market for it, why keep using wood as late as 1900 in a place like Pennsylvania, the heart of the American steel industry?  Or Chicago, just a short boat ride away through the Great Lakes?  The likely answer is simply that lumber was cheap and plentiful, and the lowest bidder could get away with a lot in the golden age of laissez-faire capitalism.  Old technologies have often lived side by side with their replacements far longer than anyone expected.

The dawn of the 20th century would be a critical turning point for the pipe industry, however.  Just as new technologies had been developed to more easily make seamless pipe, vast oil and gas fields were discovered in Texas and Henry Ford figured out how to mass produce automobiles.  Demand for metal pipe skyrocketed just at the time supply learned how to keep up.  As electric lights replaced gas light, the gas went to fuel the power plants instead.  The intense mechanization for World War I drove nearly every industry to new heights and created demand for national engineering standards just as progressive political movements for workplace safety were gaining traction in popular culture.  Together, these elements and more signaled the death knell of old, unreliable wood pipe.

Today, despite the odd sensational headline now and then, there is no evidence that any remaining wooden gas pipe in the U.S. is still actively transporting gas.  Even if a handful are remarkably well-preserved, like the one Lloyd Gillespie found, they were replaced over a century ago by better, sturdier technology.  What remains today serves as a powerful reminder of just how far the gas industry has come from its murky origins and that pioneer spirit of making things work with what they had available.

Story suggested by Lloyd Gillespie, Business Development Manager at INTREN.