The solution of this problem is not to heat the air in the room, but to
use your steam coils to heat fresh air, and then drive this air, already
warmed, into the room, at the same time providing a vent through which
the old air can be pushed out. This is the hot air system of heating,
and it requires some kind of engine or dynamo, and therefore is
expensive. It has been installed in a few office buildings and theaters.
One of the most perfect systems I ever inspected is in the building of
the New York Stock Exchange, where the air is warmed in winter, and
cooled in summer, and freed from dust, and exactly the right quantity is
supplied. It is a humorous commentary upon our civilization that we take
perfect care of the breathing apparatus of our stock-gamblers, but pay
no attention to the breathing apparatus of our senators and congressmen,
whose one business in life is to use their lungs. The stately old
building with its white marble domes looks impressive in moving pictures
and on illustrated postcards, but it has no system of ventilation
whatever, and is a death-trap to the poor wretches who are compelled to
spend their days, and sometimes their nights, within its walls. This
contrast is one symptom of the rise of industrial capitalism and the
collapse of political democracy.
We have reserved to the last a method of heating which is the worst, and
can only be described as a crime against health: the use of gas and oil
stoves set out in the middle of the room, without a vent, and
discharging their fumes into the room. These stoves are simply
instruments of slow death, and their manufacture should be prohibited
by law. In the meantime, what you have to do is to refuse to live in a
room or to work in an office where such stoves are used. I have heard
dealers insist that this or the other kind of gas or oil stove was so
contrived as to consume all the fumes. Do not let anybody fool you with
such nonsense. There has never been any form of combustion devised which
consumes all the fumes. No such thing can be, because the products of
combustion are not combustible. The so-called "wickless blue flame"
stoves do burn all the oil, and a properly regulated gas stove will burn
all the gas, but that simply means that it turns the oil and gas into
carbon dioxide, the very substance which your lungs are working day and
night to get out of your body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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