Gas heating and comfort in European middle-class homes: case study of the United Kingdom, France, and Spain (ca. 1850-ca.1920)

Abstract

In the Second Technological Revolution, not only did the West see the development of new strategic industrial sectors, as chemistry, oil, and electricity, but it also witnessed the birth of competition between companies to reach a broader public. In the energy sector, gas companies, which had benefitted till then from monopolistic control of the market, saw the appearance of a fierce competitor: electricity. Therefore, they took the chance to get subscribers, linking their services to bourgeois comfort, which they unsuccessfully tried to extend to the working class. In order to do so, they developed relevant publicity campaigns, in which they insisted on the improvement of homes thanks to gas appliances. In this article, we study the marketing strategies that they deployed for expanding particularly the use of gas heating in Western Europe. We focus on the British, the French, and the Spanish case, as the three countries lived under different circumstances, and they consequently illustrate the different ways in which publicity, linked to gas, evolved.