In addition to being an artist, natural scientist, and museum director, Rembrandt Peale shared his family’s talent for innovation and entrepreneurship. He demonstrated gas light in his galleries, using the new energy technology of the day as an attraction to sell evening tickets to visit the museum.

It has been said that people would stand on Holliday Street in front of the Peale Museum marveling at the brightness of the light coming from its windows – an unprecedented sight in a world of candles and oil lamps. By 1817, Peale had started the Baltimore Gas Company and secured the contract to supply gas street lights throughout Baltimore – the first city in America, and among the first in the world, to be lit by gas – hence its nickname, “Light City.” Peale manufactured the gas in a shed at the back of the museum, and it was supplied to the city in wooden pipes made from hollowed out logs.

200 years later, the business Rembrandt Peale founded at his Museum is one of the oldest in the world: Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), an Exelon Company. Volunteers from BGE and the Baltimore Foundry Works have restored gas light to the historic lamps on the front and in the back garden of the Peale so that we can see the birthplace of BGE “in a new light” again!