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William Richards and the Unrecorded Success Abroad: A British Engineer in the Spanish Gas Industry in the Nineteenth Century

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the British engineer William Richards made an important contribution to the introduction of the gas industry in Catalonia, Spain. Following his development of the dry gas meter, but failure to create a commercial business from it, Richards sought to re-establish his reputation away from the crowded British Gas industry to go in search of new horizons abroad. In 1848, he became the engineer at the Gasworks in Barcelona. Between the years of 1851 and 1859, Richards directed the construction of several gasworks in Catalonia. This paper examines the significance of Richards’s achievements, both in England and Spain during the period from 1843 to 1893. Whilst sometimes unrecognised in his country of origin, this paper demonstrates that he was an active innovator, gas engineer and an early exponent of international technology transfer in the gas manufacturing industry.