Faraday Blasts Hot Air in Parliament
Ventilation obsessed the Victorians and it turns out to be an unexpectedly interesting topic featuring in several Friday Evening Discourses at the Royal Institution in those days.
RI Blog: 26/01/2020 15:08 (Published on the rigb.org website in February 2020. Recreated here to some approximation in Feb 2022.)
Image Credit: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/lectures-on-ventilation-1869/
In the 1870s RI Professor John Tyndall gave impetus to the germ theory of disease with his experiments on supposedly empty air. That is a story for another time. But people were already fearful of pernicious miasmas when cholera arrived in Britain in the 1830s. Sir James Clark, royal doctor, instilled in Queen Victoria a fanaticism for fresh air, and her windows were usually flung wide, often to the consternation of guests. One suspects that several of the FED lecturers were of the same mind as we shall see.
Overzealous stuffing of a furnace at the Houses of Parliament in 1834 led to their burning to the ground. The reconstruction was a major technological project and Scottish physician and chemist, David Boswell Reid was invited to design the ventilation of both temporary accommodation and the new state-of-the-art building. Reid gave a FED in 1842, Experimental Researches on the Connection Between Ventilation and Respiration. Unfortunately, no details survive. He fell out with Barry the architect and so, while MPs still praise Barry and Pugin’s ogives and pinnacles, Reid has been painted as a charlatan despite his innovations and successes.
Reid ventilated the Commons. In 1847 Michael Faraday, whose advice had been sought on the matter, lectured on Mr Barry's Mode of Ventilating the New House of Lords. We are told he found it ‘beautiful, both in principle and practice’.
‘By passing the steam-cockle the air is warmed, but never highly heated or burnt, as it is called. In the wall of Victoria Hall there are eight flues which rise to the top of the building, leading from the mixing-apartment to the compartments from whence, through the perforated casings and ornamental work of the beams, &c. currents of air are brought down into the house.’ – Literary Gazette
Faraday soon afterwards returned to the lecture theatre with a particular detail of the scheme, The Steam Jet. He was an advocate of Bell’s steam jet, its blast a key feature creating air flow.
‘He then illustrated the manner in which the circumambient air, even to the amount of several hundred times the volume of the steam, was drawn into and mixed with the issuing stream, and carried forward by it. This set and indraught of the air was shewn by the way in which large flames, applied at different parts of the cone of vapour, were drawn into it; by the manner in which light fabrics like muslin were swept up; and by the indraught and sustentation of glass bubbles, egg-shells, &c. into and in the jet of steam when either vertical or considerably inclined.’ – Literary Gazette
Moving from the House to the home, in 1851 William Hosking, an architect and engineer, gave a lecture On Ventilation by the Parlour Fire. He had a book out, Healthy Homes, in 1849. But in the lecture there was something bothering him more than the fireplace.
‘Nothing has been done to relieve the drains and sewers of their worst offence. The evolution of foul and noxious gases in the drains is certainly not prevented by scouring the sewers. In the mean time the poison exists underfoot, and exudes at every pregnable point within and about our houses, and it rises at every grating in our streets, though the senses may become dull to them by constant suffering.’
In 1856 in a lecture On Ventilation and the Means of Determining its Amount, Henry Bence Jones sought to bring about a quantitative analysis of ventilation.
‘If a fish were confined under water in a glass tube open at the two ends, the time during which the fish would live in the tube would not depend on the cubic contents of the tube, but on the quantity of water caused to pass through the openings. So the cubic contents of a room will give no more information than the cubic contents of the glass tube.’
Jones’ table of ‘cubic space actually given to persons’ is a horror story in plain statistics.
The transatlantic slave trade was abolished by Britain in 1807 but it continued elsewhere until 1859.
Jones examined various ways in which to measure the carbon dioxide of the air in a room. He made experiments with the ‘close air in St Pancras workhouse’. But the results were unsatisfactory and inconclusive. But he did note the lower mortality in a maternity hospital when Dr Reed’s [sic] system of ventilation was used.
‘We have all probably come to the full belief that a house badly drained causes disease and death; but we hardly yet fully admit to ourselves that a house or body without good means of ventilation is a house or body badly drained. At present our chimneys are our chief aerial drains, which almost cease to act as soon as the temperature outside and inside the house is the same.’
Carbon dioxide was only one contaminant of the air. Robert Angus Smith lectured in 1859 On the Estimation of the Organic Matter of the Air, a few months after the climactic Great Stink of 1858 when feculent fumes from the Thames drove MPs from parliament.
He measured relative quantities of organic and other oxidizable matter in the air in various localities.
It was from Smith, later in life, from whom we gained the term acid rain.
Surgeon Thomas Pridgin Teale did not think much of metropolitan air either. The Principles of Domestic Fireplace Construction was his 1886 lecture and he invoked the words of Ri founder Count Rumford in support of his own interest in the economy of domestic fireplaces.
‘The enormous waste of fuel in London may be estimated by the vast dark cloud which continually hangs over this great metropolis, and frequently overshadows the whole country, far and wide; for this dense cloud is certainly composed almost entirely of unconsumed coal which, having stolen wings from the innumerable fires of this great city, has escaped by the chimneys, and continues to sail about in the air till, having lost the heat which gave it volatility, it falls in a dry shower of extremely fine black dust to the ground, obscuring the atmosphere in its descent, and frequently changing the brightest day into more than Egyptian darkness.’
Like Rumford, he wanted to burn fuel efficiently and project more of the heat forwards from the hearth and not up chimney.
Teale had long championed salubrity in the home. His 1878 book, A Pictorial Guide to Domestic Sanitary Defects, illustrated how sewer vapours might invade the boudoir or nursery. It amuses and horrifies, with tableaux such as the butler who, sent to fetch a bottle of wine, disappears under the collapsing cellar floor into a long-forgotten cesspit.
Image Credit:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t5gb1zk4g;seq=101;width=1020
One of the few lectures of the century which might be described as mathematical had a most unexpected bearing on ventilation. In 1874 James Joseph Sylvester lectured On Recent Discoveries in Mechanical Conversion of Motion. He was bringing to British public notice Peaucellier’s mechanical linkage, superseding and perfecting after nine decades James Watt’s proudest achievement, his ‘parallel motion’ for a reciprocating engine. Engineer at the Houses of Parliament, William Prim, was inspired to install it there as part of a ventilating machine in 1877. Simply, the pure up and down movement had less of a squeak to disturb the house. Word has it that it may still be there.
[Post script. Unfortunately, it is n't.]
Image Credit: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27106
Laurence Scales leads London tours featuring the history of science, invention and medicine. He is a graduate in engineering who has worked in various technological industries.
