Lectures on Ventilation: Being a Course Delivered in the Franklin Institute of PhiladelphiaLeeds, Lewis W.
Science
Lectures on Ventilation: Being a Course Delivered in the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia
Leeds, Lewis W.
Ventilation
Sanitarians have given much attention to this subject lately, and have
been astonished at the magnitude of the evil. I have long maintained
that a family might go to the highest and most healthy location in the
world, and by a little carelessness might accumulate sufficient filth
around them, and by closing up the house at night and allowing the foul
gases from untrapped sewers and cesspools to enter through the halls
to their sleeping rooms, to thus make what would otherwise be a healthy
place a very unhealthy one.
As a case in point, I would refer to a very interesting report of Doctors
Palmer, Ford, and Earle, giving an account of their investigations of the
causes of a severe epidemic that occurred in the summer of 1864 in a young
ladies' seminary in Massachusetts. "The Maplewood Institute" is situated
in Pittsfield, one of the most beautiful of those charming New England
villages, which, to external appearances, are the very emblem of all that
is pure and healthy. Yet even in this lovely place, from an ignorant or
careless arrangement of the drains and cess-pools, much of the foul gas
generated there found its way into the building,[2] making sixty-six out
of seventy-four young ladies sick, fifty-seven of whom had the typhoid
fever and thirteen died. Many similar cases are frequently occurring,
some few of which, like this, are carefully investigated, and the causes
removed. Many more, however, go unnoticed, and are accepted as special
dispensations of Providence, when it is all due to our own negligence.
I want to show you an arrangement that ought to be in every house. We
have seen the power of a fire to create a draft, and if you will think
a little you will notice that the kitchen fire is the most considerable
and most permanent power in ordinary dwellings, and this ought to be
made use of to ventilate the kitchen, water-closet and bath-room in
every house. But you must not make an opening directly into the kitchen
flue; if you do you will interfere with the draft of the kitchen fire,
and if you interfere with the kitchen fire you will soon wish yourself
at anything but keeping house.
But we can easily get over that trouble. We will use this square glass box
again to represent a flue. I don't mean this to represent the size--it
ought to be twice that size. In the centre we will put a cold pipe, to
show you that a pipe without any heat in it would only cause the foul
air to tumble down into the room. Thus you see the smoke descending. We
will substitute a pipe with a gas light to heat it. Now you see what
a rapid current there is out of this large flue. See what a splendid
arrangement this is for ventilating, and it may be extended so as to
ventilate the whole house. It is not necessary that the room to be
ventilated should be adjoining, but a pipe can be carried between the
floors 50 or 100 feet.
I had an opportunity, during the late war, of thoroughly testing this
system of ventilation in the government hospitals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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