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
The other tables giving the analysis of the air of London, Paris, Madrid,
Geneva, Bolton, England, at different elevations on the mountains, on the
Atlantic Ocean, Washington City and various other places, are interesting
only because they show so great a uniformity in the carbonic acid, seldom
exceeding six parts to the ten thousand, and seldom under four.
But now let us look upon the other side of the room. Here we have tables
giving the "carbonic acid in houses." Here we will find very different
results. But the first is a green-house; in that there is no trace
of carbonic acid in the evening and scarcely a trace in the morning.
Plants, you know, absorb the carbonic acid, and give off oxygen, while
animals absorb the oxygen and give off carbonic acid, thus keeping up
the equilibrium in nature, as is so beautifully shown in the aquarium.
Plants are generally supposed to give off carbonic acid at night, but
it must be in very small quantities.
I consider them very conducive to health in a living-room, morally and
physically.
But this want of carbonic acid does not last long.
The next is M. Dumas' lecture-room. At commencement of lecture 42·5,
and at close of lecture 67 parts in ten thousand.
Now, I think we are on the right track for discovering that mysterious
poison that has carried so many of our friends to their graves, even
in the very prime of life.
Here we have dormitories, 52; do., 37; asylum, 17; school-room, 30;
do., 56; Chamber of Deputies, 16; Opera Comique, parterre, 15; do.,
ceiling, 28; stable, 7; do., 14; hospital, Madrid, 30; do., do., 43;
air of bed-room on rising in the morning, 48; the same after being
ventilated two hours, 16; railroad car, 34; workshop, Munich, 19; full
room, do., 22; lecture-room, 32; beer-saloon, 49; and worst of all is
a well-filled school-room, 72 parts of carbonic acid in 10,000.
That, I think, is enough. Here we have the solution of the whole mystery.
It is not in the external atmosphere that we must look for the greatest
impurities, but it is in our own houses that the blighting, withering
curse of foul air is to be found. We are thus led to the conclusion
that _our own breath is our greatest enemy_.
The "Health of Towns Commission," in their investigations, after
examining various trades, where the employees were confined mostly in
houses, and having left the scavengers to the last, expecting to find a
rich harvest of mortality among them, were much surprised to find them
more healthy than many very clean occupations, but which were conducted
in houses instead of in the open air. I have not the statistics before
me, but I should not be surprised to learn that that singular race of
beings that live in the sewers of Paris were as healthy, if not even
more so, than the operatives of some of those exquisitely beautiful,
clean, air-tight factories of New England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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