Acetylene Gas. Edmund Davy, an Englishman, first made acetylene gas in 1836 from a compound produced during the manufacture of potassium tartrate and charcoal.

But the discovery of a cheap process which made the gas a commercial possibility was due to accident. In the summer of 1892 T. L. Willson, an American metallurgical investigator, had erected a smelting furnace on the bank of a stream in North Carolina. In his experiments he often had occasion to use quantities of limestone and rock-salt. Fused in the great heat of the furnace, the substances yielded a peculiar slag containing some sort of dirty-grayish matter with which Willson was unfamiliar. Week by week he dumped this slag unconcernedly into the stream, until one day the pile of slag projected above the surface of the water. The next time he dumped the red-hot slag into the stream he was surprised to see a dazzling burst of flame, which hovered above the pile and shot up into the air. Puzzled to find the reason for this phenomenon, he awaited with interest the next opportunity for dumping. It was at night, and he was amazed at the brilliant whiteness of the light. Then he placed some of the dirty-grayish material on the bank and pured water on it, but to his surprise nothing happened. When he held a match over the damp pile, however, there was an instant burst of white flame--and the discovery had been made.