It
is difficult to say which company produced the first gas fire.
Collector of gas ephemera, Billy Carter, believes that it could
have been Willsons and Mathiesons and that an early fire dated
around 1895 in his collection may, indeed, be the first commercial
model. The company had started as umbrella manufacturers but
in the entrepreneurial environment of the late Victorian era,
good engineers tended to turn their hand to anything that was
profitable. The early fires were very simple – a basic
gas burner heated a cast iron carcass that radiated the heat
out into the room. Typically they were free-standing and moveable
with the products of combustion fed straight into the room!
 As
the country entered the 20th century there was literally hundreds
of companies producing all sorts of gas fires together with
cookers, water heaters, wash boilers and a whole raft of other
products. Some names like New World and Parkray continue through
to the present day. Others like Arden Hill, Eagle Range and
Bratt Colbran have disappeared into larger conglomerates. As
the companies proliferated the technology also improved. Designs
became fireplace based, utilising the ‘Milner fireback’
that had appeared towards the end of the previous century as
the efficient chimney base for artisan’s cottages. Ceramic
radiants, often with elaborate designs, began to be used to
project radiant heat from the front of the fires into the rooms.
These design progressions bridged World War I and, by the 1920s,
a well established industry was turning out over a million gas
fires a year which were sold by the myriads of gas showrooms
owned by the private and municipal gas companies.
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