Starting from the São Cristóvão Gasworks, a factory that for over a century has been responsible for the production, storage and distribution of manufactured gas to the city of Rio de Janeiro, the present work expands in three axes: Archive, Business and Gas Operation. Through the archival experimentation, the first axis investigates the concept of “archive” and the action of “archiving” while narrating the forces inherent to the access, conservation and destruction of existing archives, as well as the creation of a new one, the “thesis-archive”. The second axis discusses the beginnings of the Light, a foreign business group that held the monopoly over some of the main public utility services of Brazil’s two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, highlighting aspects of what could be understood as its pioneer organizational culture. The third axis traces a panorama of Rio de Janeiro’s gas operation during the first half of the twentieth century, by gathering and reworking a series of discourses found in business reports, letters and newspaper articles, pointing out some of the conflicts, fears, desires of modernity, technological changes, social stigmas and disciplinary continuations that, from one tip of the urban network to the other, implicated bosses and engineers, male and female workers. From the archive to the business company, from the factory that generated gas to the kitchen stove that consumed it, the fragments exposed herein compose a saying Archive that says State, which in turn says of certain violences.