Professor Jacob, late Professor of Pathology, Yorkshire College, Leeds,
gives the following example on a large scale, to show the results of
insufficient ventilation: "A great politician was expected to make an
important speech. As there was no room of sufficient dimensions
available in the town, a large courtyard, surrounded with buildings, was
temporarily roofed over, some space being left under the eaves for
ventilation. Long before the appointed time several thousand people
assembled, and in due course the meeting began; but before the speaker
got well into his subject, there arose from the vast multitude a cry for
air, numbers of people were fainting, and every one felt oppressed and
well-nigh stifled. It was only after some active persons had climbed on
the roof and forcibly torn off the boards for a space about twenty feet
square that the business of the meeting could be resumed."
Remembering that the process of breathing is for the purpose of
supplying oxygen to the blood and that the absorption of oxygen in the
lungs is the same process which goes on when a candle burns, the
following experiments were made by Professor King of the University of
Wisconsin, to show the effect of expired air on a candle flame. He took
a two-quart mason jar and lowered a lighted candle to the bottom, noting
that the candle burned with scarcely diminished intensity. Through a
rubber tube, he breathed gently into the bottom of the jar, with the
result that the candle gradually had a reduced flame and was finally
extinguished. He observed also that if the candle were raised as the
flame showed signs of going out, the brilliancy of the flame was
restored, while lowering the candle tended to extinguish the flame. Even
when the candle was raised to the top of the jar, the flame was
extinguished after sufficient air had been breathed into the jar.
Clearly, then, he argued, air once breathed is not suitable for
respiration, unless much diluted with pure air. He argued from this that
if a candle using oxygen for combustion could not burn in expired air,
therefore an individual using oxygen for the renewal of the blood could
not be properly supplied in a room partially saturated with the expired
products of the lungs.
Professor King also experimented with a candle burning in a jar on which
the cover had been placed, and found that the candle was extinguished in
thirty seconds, and he argued that if a candle was thus extinguished on
account of the carbonic acid given off, so a person shut up in an
air-tight chamber would similarly be extinguished in the course of
time.
To prove that expired air is poisonous to animal life, Professor King
experimented on a hen, placing the same in a cylindrical metal air-tight
chamber eighteen inches in diameter and twenty inches deep. The hen
became severely distressed for want of ventilation and died at the end
of four hours and seventeen minutes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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