Methane

Methane was not invented—it was identified. The gas had been bubbling up from swamps and seeping from the earth for billions of years, produced by archaea metabolizing organic matter in oxygen-free environments. Humans had encountered it as the 'will-o'-the-wisp' flickering over marshes at night, as the 'eternal fires' worshipped by ancient Persians in Azerbaijan, as the fuel Chinese engineers piped through bamboo from brine wells in Sichuan as early as 400 BCE. By 211 BCE, the Chinese had drilled wells 150 meters deep specifically for natural gas, using bamboo poles and primitive percussion bits. But no one understood what this substance actually was until Alessandro Volta poked the muddy bottom of Lake Maggiore with a stick.

On November 3, 1776, while vacationing on the Italian lake, Volta noticed bubbles rising through the water near the reeds at Angera. Curious, he collected the gas in bottles using a funnel—a simple apparatus but one that required the prior development of pneumatic chemistry and the understanding that 'airs' could be captured and studied as distinct substances. By 1778, he had isolated pure methane and demonstrated that it could be ignited by an electric spark, especially when mixed with atmospheric air. He called it 'inflammable air native to marshes,' a colorless and odorless hydrocarbon that would eventually reshape global energy.

The prerequisites for Volta's discovery were specific: the tradition of pneumatic chemistry established by researchers like Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish, who had identified other gases in the previous decades; the Leyden jar for generating electric sparks; and the eudiometer, a device Volta himself refined, for measuring gas volumes after combustion. In 1786, Antoine Lavoisier identified Volta's marsh gas as a compound of carbon and hydrogen. In 1866, German pharmacist August Wilhelm von Hofmann gave it its modern name 'methane,' derived from methanol.

The cascade from Volta's marsh bubbles to global energy infrastructure took a century to build. The first commercial application of natural gas in North America came in 1821, when a shallow well in Fredonia, New York supplied gas through small lead pipes for street lighting and cooking. For most of the 19th century, manufactured coal gas—not natural methane—lit city streets and heated buildings, because natural gas couldn't be transported far from wells. Pittsburgh's iron and steel works were early industrial adopters, valuing natural gas for its stable and controllable combustion temperature.

The transformation came with long-distance pipelines in the early 20th century. Natural gas contained twice the heating value of manufactured coal gas at 39 megajoules per cubic meter, and once pipeline networks expanded, it replaced town gas throughout the industrialized world by the 1930s. Robert Bunsen's 1885 burner, which mixed air with gas for controlled combustion, became essential laboratory equipment and the ancestor of every gas stove and cooktop.

Today, methane heats homes, generates electricity, and powers industrial processes worldwide. The gas that Volta collected in bottles from marsh mud—produced by the same microbial metabolism that has operated since life began—now moves through millions of kilometers of pipeline. It also traps heat in Earth's atmosphere with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, making this ancient bacterial byproduct both essential fuel and climate threat.