Short answers, pulled from the story.
William Murdoch was a Scottish inventor and engineer, born on the 21st of August 1754 at Bello Mill in Ayrshire and died in 1839, aged 85. He worked for most of his career with Boulton and Watt and is credited with pioneering domestic gas lighting, building Britain's first working steam carriage, and inventing the pneumatic message tube.
Murdoch is among the principal pioneers of gas lighting, with his experiments beginning in 1792 at Redruth, Cornwall, where his house became the first domestic residence in the world to be lit by gas. By 1805 he had completed the lighting of the Philips and Lee cotton mill in Manchester, which grew from 50 to 904 gas lights. The Dutch-Belgian academic Jean-Pierre Minckelers had published on coal gasification in 1784 and lit a university auditorium from 1785.
Murdoch built his first working model of a steam carriage in 1784 in Redruth; witnesses saw it run around his living room, making it the first recorded self-propelled machine in Britain. When he tried to travel to London to patent the design, his employer Matthew Boulton intercepted him at Exeter in 1795 and persuaded him to return without registering the patent. The original model is preserved at Thinktank, the Birmingham Science Museum, and a full-size working reproduction made its first public journey in Redruth in 2007.
Murdoch's employment contract with Boulton and Watt gave the firm ownership of any inventions he made, and several of his most significant contributions, including the sun and planet gear, were patented under the name of James Watt rather than Murdoch. He also failed to patent gas lighting, on the advice of James Watt Junior, leaving the commercial gains to former assistant Samuel Clegg and others.
The Royal Society awarded Murdoch the Rumford Gold Medal in 1808 for "both the first idea of applying, and the first actual application of gas to economical purposes." He received the medal in the same year he presented his paper "Account of the Application of Gas from Coal to Economical Purposes" to the Society.
The coal gas production process Murdoch developed yielded byproducts whose consequences extended well beyond his lifetime. Coal tar was found in 1853 by Charles Gerhardt to contain acetylsalicylic acid, now known as aspirin, and was used by William Henry Perkin in 1856 to produce mauve, the first synthetic dye. Phenol, another byproduct, became a component of bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, invented in 1910.