The present work follows along the first half of the 20th century the operation of the São Cristóvão Gasworks, inaugurated by Société Anonyme du Gaz de Rio de Janeiro in 1911 in the Harbor area of Rio de Janeiro. Therefore, a short description is made on the beginning of the city’s public lighting system up until its annexation to the public utility monopoly carried out by the Canadian company ‘Rio de Janeiro Tramway, Light and Power Company Limited’ (Light), with the aim of acknowledging the intricate political and social scene that has allowed the construction of one of the world’s largest gasworks at the time. From this exemplary case, this paper defends that an unstable man-machine symbiosis maintained within the gas factory has consisted on a fertile ground for the actualization of the disciplinary power diagram and, as such, a passage point to Rio de Janeiro’s modern city utopia. Furthermore, the fragments presented here, collected on newspaper articles and business reports, witness the success and challenges of the gas operation, as well as the reserve of discursive imagination that, in opposition to the disordered city, has tried to achieve on the spaces of capitalist production the promise of rationality and progress associated with the inexorable march of technological innovation.