Surprised to hear about finding live gas piping in light fixtures. Maybe everyone thought electricity was a passing fad—it wouldn’t last and next month the mantles would go back in.
IIRC, gas pipes were the original electrical raceway—so ideally they would have been abandoned from their original use. That evolved into enameled (black) rigid conduit, with galvanized special for outside work. Eventually GRC became sort of a commodity item and completely upstaged enamel. Then IMC, well...
pauluk-- Your sign is not that far off. About 80 miles from here is a garbage-gas plant that literally draws very-low-yield methane out of the ground from long-buried, decaying household trash and pushes it into 3 twelve-cylinder Caterpillar engines for an electrical output of 2.1MW. Been in service since 1983 and power leaves the yard at 20,780 volts...an early entrant into that "integrated waste management" bureaucracy/empire.
