pit coal, and by the autumn of 1819, Russia's first gas street light was lit on one of the streets on Aptekarsky Island. In February 1835, the Company for Gas Lighting St. Petersburg was founded; towards the end of that year, a factory for the production of lighting gas was constructed near the Obvodny Canal, using pit coal brought in by ship from Cardiff; and 204 gas lamps were ceremonially lit in St. Petersburg on September 27, 1839. Over the next 10 years, their numbers almost quadrupled, to reach 800. By the middle of the 19th century, the central streets and buildings of the capital were illuminated: the Palace Square, Bolshaya and Malaya Morskaya streets, Nevsky and Tsarskoselsky Avenues, Passage Arcade, Noblemen's Assembly, the Technical Institute and Peter and Paul Fortress. Theatrical use It took many years of development and testing before gas lighting for the stage was commercially available. Gas technology was then installed in just about every major theatre in the world. But gas lighting was short-lived because the electric light bulb soon followed. In the 19th century, gas stage lighting went from a crude experiment to the most popular way of lighting theatrical stages. In 1804, Frederick Albert Winsor first demonstrated the way to use gas to light the stage in London at the Lyceum Theatre. Although the demonstration and all the lead research were being done in London, "in 1816 at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia was the earliest gas lit theatre in world". In 1817 the Lyceum, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden theatres were all lit by gas. Gas was brought into the building by "miles of rubber tubing from outlets in the floor called 'water joints'" which "carried the gas to border-lights and wing lights". But before it was distributed, the gas came through a central distribution point called a "gas table", which varied the brightness by regulating the gas supply, and the gas table, which allowed control of separate parts of the stage. Thus it became the first stage 'switchboard'. By the 1850s, gas lighting in theatres had spread practically all over the United States and Europe. Some of the largest installations of gas lighting were in large auditoriums, like the Theatre de Chatelet, built in 1862. In 1875, the new Paris Opera was constructed. "Its lighting system contained more than twenty-eight miles [] of gas piping, and its gas table had