AGA Laboratories helped set standards for gas appliances
In the 1920s, in keeping with its self-appointed role as the voice of the gas industry, the American Gas Association sought to become the nation’s clearinghouse of information on natural gas—covering metering, chemistry, rates and safety.
To that end, the association established AGA Laboratories in a Cleveland, Ohio, facility rented from East Ohio Gas Company in 1925. The purpose was to provide for the safety testing of gas appliances, which the industry had discussed since 1910.
“The establishment of an official testing laboratory marks one of the most progressive steps ever taken by any industry in raising the standards of its public service,” wrote AGA Laboratories Director R.M. Conner and Assistant Director F.E. Vandaver in an article titled “Testing Laboratory of the American Gas Association” in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry in 1928.
Gas companies funded the lab’s establishment, and manufacturing members supplied a large share of its testing equipment, the article said.
Shortly thereafter, gas company members pledged themselves to purchase and sell only AGA-approved ranges, space heaters and tubing. At the same time, many appliance manufacturers agreed to make only products that received AGA approval.
The authors of the 1928 article said that with such industrywide cooperation, the public would conclude that an AGA-approved product equaled a stamp that signified quality and standards that would help enable safer operations.”
Wartime proved a challenge to the gas industry—one that AGA Labs would answer.
At first, with growing restrictions on the manufacture of household gas appliances and the departure of many engineers for the armed forces, AGA Labs faced a struggle to keep going, according to an AGA 75th anniversary article in American Gas Monthly in July 1993.
Conner shifted the lab’s focus to war work, and by the end of 1943, lab staff had been increased by 125 percent. Among 14 devices developed for military use were regulators for oxygen masks used by the Army Air Force for high-altitude flying and oxygen therapeutic sets used during airlifts of casualties, according to American Gas Monthly. AGA Laboratories earned a War Department citation for that work.
Some of AGA’s research functions would be shifted to the Gas Research Institute in 1976 (a predecessor to today’s Gas Technology Institute), and the labs themselves were sold to the Canadian Standards Association in 1998.