Early Gas Cookers

In the late eighteenth century, the Reverend John Clayton provided the first account of cooking with gas when he described how eggs and beef had been boiled at a natural gas spring near Wigan, in northwest England. The first person to attempt gas cooking inside he home was the German gas pioneer Frederick Albert Winsor, who began experimenting at his home in Braunschweig in 1802. However, in the early decades of town gas production, gas was mainly piped to factories, public buildings, and street-lighting installations. In Britain, the first gas cookers were intended for commercial catering use. They bore little resemblance to modern gas cookers, consisting merely of an oven with burners at the bottom and a meat jack suspended from the top. Gas cookers were displayed at the Great Exhibition, held in London in 1851, by which time household gas provision was becoming more widespread. By 1869, gas cookers had evolved into a form closer to the modern gas cooker, with internal shelves and top burners, and were available for hire in Britain. During the late nineteenth century, gas became a relatively cheap fuel in Britain as the industry was by then largely municipally owned, whereas in the United States gas was a more expensive alternative to solid fuel. Therefore, in Britain, gas cookers became slowly but steadily more popular and, by 1900, were found in 2 million homes.