Draped in a wrinkle of the Surrey Hills, Godalming makes a fascinating target for an electric car excursion, even if, like to so many destinations, it’s not exactly choked with recharge points.

Maybe that’s surprising, because as far as electricity and early adoption goes, Godalming is a trailblazer. Or was: 140 years ago, in the closing months of 1881, the world’s press flocked here to report on a global first that would pip Thomas Edison’s lighting up of New York by a full year. To put this more starkly, as Nansi Taylor, a guide I meet in the town’s delightful little museum, proclaims, “If the rest of the world had done what Godalming did back then, the world today would be a different place.”

Not that this seems a natural arena for innovation. Godalming’s existence is largely due to its chance location, mid-way between London and Portsmouth. To look at, it offers several streets of architectural splendour, but it failed to captivate London travel writer James Hissey, who alighted from the town centre station shortly before Queen Victoria died: “I had an idea – how I came about it I cannot say,” he wrote, “that Godalming was a pleasant and picturesque town; my drive through it effectually got rid of that idea. I saw nothing pleasant or picturesque about it, even allowing for the determined and depressing drizzle that dulled the outlook.” 

These days, estate agents lose little sleep over Hissey’s fit. A three-bed semi can leave you with not much change from £1 million; in 2013, Godalming was declared the fourth best place to live in the UK; three years later, it became the most prosperous. 

To understand 1881 and all that, we need to rewind to 1880. Godalming’s streets, along with many homes, were illuminated by the municipal standard of gas, most of that being derived from coal. Not only was it volatile, but the combination of hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and sulphur brought many health risks, not least the risk of carbon monoxide suffocation. 

Keen for change, Godalming’s borough councillors were a progressive bunch, many keeping abreast of such bold innovations as Carl Wilhelm Siemens’ carbon arc lamps and Joseph Swan’s incandescent bulb. Their curiosity, however, was not rare. As historian Francis Haveron wrote in The Brilliant Ray, a 1981 book unearthed for me from the museum’s archives. Gas was “a tremendous relief to the eyes and a desirable preventative to the activities of thieves, robbers and ne’er do wells who might lurk in dark corners”, but it was viewed as a rip-off, while the equipment “often leaked toxic gas and not infrequently blew up”. 

So the town was ripe for change, but Haveron reveals Godalming would never have been propelled to world fame without the vision and determination of one man: local businessman John Pullman. A mill owner and leather worker by trade, Millman was a classic entrepreneur and inventor, an automotive footnote on his CV including, as advertised in a 1906 issue of The Motor, Pullman’s Non-Skid Bands which, at 10s 6d a pair, promised to make motoring safer. Most importantly, Pullman hated waste and the water from the River Wey that busied his waterwheel at Westbrook Mill ran idle at night: could it not be put to productive use for something the town could use after dark?

Pullman’s idea explains my museum guide’s wild enthusiasm for what happened next: not only did the town bring in the best of technological talent to create a new lighting system, it also powered the wiring by hydropower rather than coal, thereby creating a sustainable system any postcode would be proud of today. 

At the great switch-on, the Daily Telegraph was literally dazzled by Godalming’s brilliance: “The days when gas companies can pump in to our houses a noxious, explosive vapour like carburetted hydrogen, through uncertain machines called meters and charge an abnormally extortionate price for it are numbered,” it thundered.

Godalming’s deal cost a market-disrupting £195 a year, the apparent success of the scheme sending shockwaves through the gas industry and spawning copycat systems in Chesterfield and Norwich. But within two weeks, town councillors would note that the scheme had been “only a partial success”.

While the larger street lamps had given “fair satisfaction”, many side street lamps burned with no more than a “dull red glow”. As Nansi explains, from her own research, many of the side streets remained in darkness. Furthermore, the degree of private homes taking up the offer of electricity, to make the experiment more profitable for the supplier, was low. 

Flooding of the Wey also disrupted power and by 1882, having failed to boost current through an additional wheel, Siemens replaced the generator with a traction engine, closer to the action, in the town centre. But the economic vultures were circling. Gas providers lobbied the town incessantly, while the covert actions of shady figures most likely to have been connected to the old order, made plenty of mischief. 

“There was what you might call ‘Luddite activity’ from those who were against electricity. Cables were even ripped out from where they crossed the river,” Nansi adds. In some cases, with cables largely uninsulated, the results of such sabotage backfired: two boatmen who decided to hoist the cables aloft from the river found themselves “imprisoned” by their hands-on approach.

So by 1884, gas was back, the plug finally pulled on the scheme. But was Godalming’s awakening to the joy of electricity a mistake? Hardly. 

Just a few paces across the semi-pedestrianised street from Godalming’s famous “Pepper Pot”, the original Town Hall, a plaque is affixed proudly on a lamp post where the town’s main electric light first shone out. By 2014, it declares, there were 87,762 such street lights throughout Surrey. Gas street lighting, an idea that began in 1812, might have returned to Godalming, but it was an episode that lasted only for another 20 years. By 1904, Godalming was once again at the forefront. And it never looked back.

Meanwhile, the 20th century would mark a gradual dimming for the Victorian’s love affair with vapour, the last public gas lamp spluttering to a halt in 1971.