Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Heming, Edmund
HEMING, EDMUND (fl. 1695), projector, who lived ‘near the Still-yard in Thames Street,’ obtained letters patent about 1684 conveying to him for a term of five years the exclusive right of lighting London. He undertook for a moderate consideration to place a light before every tenth door on moonless nights from Michaelmas to Lady day. He also announced his readiness to supply lights in houses, stables, yards, mines, or for coaches or horses ‘that travel late at night,’ offering at the same time to depict coats of arms or ‘any other fancy’ on the lights ‘in a very curious manner.’ His scheme met with opposition. He was especially harassed by one Vernatti, ‘who set up the glass lights in Cornhill,’ and by certain of the city companies, who feared that his project would prove destructive to their particular trades. The lord mayor and court of aldermen after many hearings issued a precept recommending the ‘new lights’ to all the wardmotes and gentlemen of the quests in London. Fearing that his servants might be corrupted by his enemies, Heming looked after his lights himself at midnight, and again at four or five o'clock in the morning, and became in consequence seriously ill. In 1686 want of funds obliged him to take partners, who, as he relates in a printed ‘Case’ (1689), brought him to the verge of bankruptcy by pirating his invention and refusing to contribute their full share of expenses. Heming laid before the House of Commons, in December 1695, printed proposals for raising eight millions of money by imposing a duty on beds at twopence per week each bed for four years and a half (Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation, iii. 563). The absurdity of the scheme was pointed out in some anonymous ‘Objections’ published in the same year.
[Macaulay's Hist. of England, chap. iii.]