Samuel Clegg

Samuel Clegg was a British civil engineer, born March 2, 1781 in Manchester, England and died January 8, 1861 in Haverstock, London, who helped establish gas lighting as a practical industrial and commercial technology. He received a scientific education under the chemist John Dalton and apprenticed at Boulton and Watt's Soho Manufactory before turning to the emerging gas industry, where he invented lime purifiers that simplified the removal of impurities from manufactured gas and, in patents filed in 1815 and 1818, developed the wet gas meter whose design underlay every later improvement in measuring gas for billing. In 1813 he lit Rudolph Ackermann's London printshop with gas to notable success, and the following year became engineer of the Chartered Gas Company, one of the first companies formed to supply gas lighting commercially in Britain; he also installed early gas lighting at cotton and worsted mills and later worked for the Portuguese government reconstructing the Lisbon mint. He became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1829, and his son, also named Samuel Clegg, followed him into civil engineering.