on the Continent, a sizeable business producing gas for several cities in mainland, Europe, including Berlin, was established, with Sir William Congreve, 2nd Baronet as general manager. The 1839 invention, the Bude-Light, provided a brighter and more economical lamp. Oil-gas appeared in the field as a rival of coal gas. In 1815, John Taylor patented an apparatus for the decomposition of "oil" and other animal substances. Public attention was attracted to "oil-gas" by the display of the patent apparatus at Apothecary's Hall, by Taylor & Martineau. In 1891 the gas mantle was invented by the Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach. This eliminated the need for special illuminating gas (a synthetic mixture of hydrogen and hydrocarbon gases produced by destructive distillation of bituminous coal or peat) to get bright shining flames. Acetylene was also used from about 1898 for gas lighting on a smaller scale. Illuminating gas was used for gas lighting, as it produces a much brighter light than natural gas or water gas. Illuminating gas was much less toxic than other forms of coal gas, but less could be produced from a given quantity of coal. The experiments with distilling coal were described by John Clayton in 1684. George Dixon's pilot plant exploded in 1760, setting back the production of illuminating gas a few years. The first commercial application was in a Manchester cotton mill in 1806. In 1901, studies of the defoliant effect of leaking gas pipes led to the discovery that ethylene is a plant hormone. Throughout the 19th century and into the first decades of the 20th, the gas was manufactured by the gasification of coal. Later in the 19th century, natural gas began to replace coal gas, first in the US, and then in other parts of the world. In the United Kingdom, coal gas was used until the early 1970s. Russia The history of the Russian gas industry began with retired Lieutenant Pyotr Sobolevsky (1782–1841), who improved Philippe le Bon's design for a "thermolamp" and presented it to Emperor Alexander I in 1811; in January 1812, Sobolevsky was instructed to draw up a plan for gas street-lighting for St. Petersburg. The French invasion of Russia delayed implementation, but St. Petersburg's Governor General Mikhail Miloradovich, who had seen the gas lighting of Vienna, Paris and other European cities, initiated experimental work on gas lighting for the capital, using British apparatus for obtaining gas from