Gas for everyone

At that time, building a gas network and offering access to every home in major cities was an interesting investment opportunity for fledgling gas companies.

To use gas, people who had one of these meters in their home would drop a coin into it.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three 2.5 cent coins would buy you 1 m3 of gas.

Because the gas price kept rising, setting a fixed price would have hurt the gas companies’ profits.

That is why they introduced gas coins, which were sold at small local shops, like grocers and tobacconists.

The price of these tokens changed with the gas price.

George Wilson supplied the coin gas meters for the city of The Hague.

Wilson was an Englishman who in 1878 had started working at the Rotterdam office of the Imperial Continental Gas Association, a leading British gas company.

In 1916, he struck out on his own and founded the De Nederlandsche Gasmeterfabriek George Wilson in The Hague.

This glass version was a demonstration model to show how the gas meter worked.

A coin is inserted, causing the gas to start running through the meter. One token buys you 1 m3 of gas.

Two bellows take turns filling up with gas and emptying again. Based on the known capacity of both bellows, it is easy to calculate how much gas is flowing in and out.

The two bellows are connected to the meters. This causes the meters to spin, which makes it possible to keep track of how much gas is being used.