USQUE AD MARE
A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton

Gas Lighting

In the years following the Trinity House report, Canada began to branch out in the development of aids to navigation. The success of mineral oil and catoptric apparatus in lighthouses established our major lights as the equal of those to be found anywhere, but the system was not adaptable to the growing number of buoys which, already changing from wood to iron or steel, must now be lighted to mark our long and tortuous shipping channels.

Gas burners offered the best solution for use in buoys. Since early in the nineteenth century gas had been in common use for many purposes and the ordinary coal gas lamp posts, now a romantic symbol of a bygone age, were familiar in large cities for street lighting. In some countries towns gas had been applied to lighthouse work but, in Canada, the lights are far from reach of city distribution. The invention of the Welsbach incandescent mantle did, however, enable engineers to use vaporized mineral oil in shore stations, an excellent source of illumination which gave a light of high density and focal compact-ness. In this system liquid petroleum was injected under pressure into a vaporizer with compressed air. On first ignition the burner was heated to the proper temperature with a spirit lamp. The next step to the use of a gaseous illuminant was to find a means of storing fuel in gaseous form.

In 1870, the Pintsch gas system came into use and achieved world-wide acceptance for the lighting of buoys and unattended lights. This oil gas was transported in pressure containers which were used to charge storage tanks attached to the lights. The gas was stored under pressures of 9-10 atmospheres but, although clean and efficient, the system was somewhat bulky to operate, particularly on the Montreal to Kingston route which had been greatly improved by large numbers of lighted buoys. Difficulties arose in the transportation of Pintsch gas and the problem was to find a gas which could be stored at higher pressure, with corresponding reduction in the size of containers, or which could be generated conveniently in the buoy tending ship or in the buoy itself. Acetylene provided the best hope for experiment because more of it could be compressed into a buoy than was possible with oil gas.

In 1902, experiments were carried out on board the CGS Scout, in which an acetylene gas generating plant was installed. Unfortunately, the risk of explosion, always a possibility in the handling of volatile hydro-carbons, was tragically demonstrated in April 1906 when the Scout was lying alongside at Kingston charging three buoys which were on deck. Without warning one of the buoys, which was at a pressure of about 12 atmospheres, suddenly exploded. The blast countermined the second and third buoys and, before they had time to escape, Captain W. H. Allison and three of the crew were killed in a detonation which demolished the upper works of the ship. From the enquiry held into the Scout explosion, it was established that the fault lay in the construction of the buoys in question, which were defective after conversion from an older type; the incident serves to emphasize dangers which, unrecognized at the time, were actually inherent in a system then considered satisfactory in principle.

CGS Scout
Built at Cardinal, Ont. for the Department of Railways and Canals, the Scout was employed as a gas buoy tender on the St. Lawrence between Montreal and Kingston. In 1906 Captain W. H. Allison and three of the crew were killed when acetylene buoys on deck exploded at Kingston. The Scout was repaired and lasted till 1934.
(Earl D. Simzer, Prescott)

In 1904, Mr. Thomas L. Willson, president of the International Marine Signal Company in Ottawa, invented a self-generating water to carbide buoy. Unlike the compression type in which acetylene was stored at high pressure, the Willson buoy was a low pressure device which carried an enormous volume of gas in the form of calcium-carbide, of which it could hold up to a ton and a half. Thomas L. Willson, largely forgotten today, was a Canadian who invented, among other ideas, the first commercial process for the manufacture of acetylene gas from calcium-carbide. He had a distinguished industrial career and was honoured by the University of Toronto by the award, for the first time, of the McCharles Prize in 1906. The endurance of the Willson acetylene buoy was greater than that of any buoys then in use.

Canada experimented with both types of acetylene buoy and made great use of the compression type, which all but ousted the Pintsch gas buoys completely. But the risk of fire or explosion could never be completely disregarded and, in course of time, the old types gave way to the present gas buoy which carries two portable cylinders of dissolved acetylene. The modern gas buoy is easy to recharge, safe in operation, and has an endurance of up to a year or more. At the height of the gaseous acetylene period the production of gas was an important business in the agencies from Halifax to Parry Sound, and a special purpose gas and derrick scow, appropriately named the Acetylene, was stationed at Prescott.