of Furnival’s Inn. A model of his invention was in the Great Exhibition
of 1851, and it is described and an engraving given of it in the
illustrated volumes published by the Royal Exhibition Commissioners at
the close of the Exhibition. The model is now in the Museum at South
Kensington. Mr. Devey’s plan was to make only one descending flue to
each building, to which the flues at the top could be either connected
or not, at pleasure; the descending flue was carried to the sewer in the
middle of the street, and the action of this was to be assisted by the
heat of the kitchen fire. He says, “The smoke would be drawn down by the
current produced by exhaustion in the sewer, the action being assisted
by the kitchen fire.” Mr. Devey did not propose to have furnace shafts,
but depended entirely upon the sewer acting as an exhaust.
In this scheme the objections were, that one descending flue was not
sufficient to carry off the smoke from several chimneys, and the sewer
certainly would not act as an exhaust without its being connected with
upright furnaces. Our sewers generally have ventilating openings which
permit their odours to ascend into our streets. Soot would no doubt
neutralize these odours--this, a paper in a late _Quarterly Review_
(April, 1866) admits. First, speaking of the sewer gases, the reviewer
says: “These offensive gases have often engendered formidable diseases,
and have, in several instances of late, been clearly shown to have
caused the outbreak both of typhoid fever and cholera.” Of this the
author has had proof during the outbreak of cholera in London in 1849.
He was superintending the construction of a mass of buildings in one of
the worst dwelling districts in London. This builder, who had just
finished the erection of Harrington House, a description of which is
given in this volume, died the first night of the outbreak in the
greatest agony; he was a strong robust man; from one to three deaths
took place in every house in the locality; a black flag was put up in
the streets, and the foul fiend reigned for a while supreme. A large
mass of the worst buildings have been cleared away, and model
lodging-houses erected, but a considerable portion of the rotten old
structures remain, the sewers are untouched, and the visitation of the
cholera forgotten.
The _Quarterly Review_ says there is no reason why ordinary sewers
should not be made to serve the double purpose of carrying off smoke and
sewage at the same time, provided they were connected here and there
with high shafts rendered powerfully expansive by furnaces; and adds,
“sewage would be improved for agricultural purposes by admixture with
soot, which is an excellent manure, and the noxious qualities of the
sewer gases would be destroyed.” Whether soot would increase the value
of sewage or decrease it, is a question for chemists to decide; a
generally increasing opinion is, that our method of using sewage by
liquefaction and sending it away, is a mistake, and renders it quite
worthless, and that the system of dry earth-closets is more conformable
to Nature’s laws.
The subject was taken up in 1857 by Mr. Peter Spence, of Manchester, a
large alum manufacturer.[G] This gentleman states that the “blacks,” the
horror of the Londoner, are guiltless of any deleterious effect to human
health, as carbon is one of the most anti-putrescent of bodies, and
while floating in the atmosphere over everything, arrest and destroy
noxious and miasmatic vapours. Perfect freedom from smoke would, if
accomplished, only increase the evil arising from the purely gaseous
results of combustion. He proposed a system of _atmospheric_ or _gaseous
sewage_, and the complete removal of all their gases to a safe distance
from our towns. He would combine this gaseous sewage in such a form with
town drainage as would bring all the liquid sewage into contact with the
gases from our furnaces and house fires, the liquid sewage being kept
from all surface drainage. The same liquid and fœtid mass of sewage he
would concentrate in an innoxious form, to be converted, in a convenient
place, where it might with perfect safety be manufactured into manure
more valuable than the richest guano.
For effecting this all the gases from our coal combustion would have to
be conveyed along the same tunnel with the sewage to centralizing
conduits converging to a point, where an immense chimney, 600 ft. high,
should be erected, to discharge these gases into the atmosphere, the
ascensive power being obtained either from the retained heat of the
gases, which would probably be found quite sufficient, or if not,
artificial heat could then be applied to effect the object. The chimney
should be of the internal diameter of 100 ft. at the top, and 140 ft.
external diameter at the bottom. This would take the smoke from 500
chimneys and every particle of foul emanation from the sewer, and every
leak or opening to the upward air from these sewers would not then emit
foul gases, but draw in fresh air with a pressure or suction of three
and a half pounds per foot, and with a velocity of 40 feet per second.
This gentleman says: “It is idle to talk of trapping, and thus confining
gases evolved under ground; exit they must and will have, and when you
imagine you have secured them in one place, you will find them pouring
out in another.” He makes this plain by an illustration. He took an
old-fashioned detached house; after entering into possession he found
frequently very disagreeable smells, especially after rain, a change of
wind, or a fall of the barometer; it may be remarked here that it was
not necessary to take an old-fashioned house to find out this; in more
modern built houses in London, after a fall in the barometer or rain,
such a thing is repeatedly occurring. Mr. Spence, to cure the evil in
his old mansion, exhausted all the remedies which the philosophy of
London schemes acknowledges; he trapped all the exits from the sewer
with the most approved patent girds; all slopstone pipes were cut and
water-luted. But this was of no use, the smell came through the very
walls and floors, and one bedroom on the first floor, which showed no
connexion with the sewer, was quite uninhabitable. He adopted a plan
which succeeded: a branch from the main sewer was brought right under
the kitchen grate, from that a pipe of cast iron, four inches in
diameter, was carried up through the brickwork, and the open top
projected into the chimney a yard and a half behind the kitchen fire,
above the fire. When this fire was again lighted, in a few hours the
house was perfectly sweet, and the distant bedroom, uninhabitable
before, has been slept in ever since. When this nuisance occurs in a
London house the only remedy is to open the doors and windows to get rid
of it, as we are not allowed to meddle with the sewers. Disagreeable
effluvia in dwellings often occur, and baffle every endeavour to trace
from where they proceed; in every case it is from choked-up drains or
the sewer, and the decomposition of animal and vegetable matter therein
retained.
As for Mr. Spence’s scheme, its grandeur almost stops its execution. It
is well known that in all large manufactories, and in gas works, a tall
chimney serves to draw out the smoke from the numerous fires, and it
forms a smoke-outlet for them all. In most of these places the fuel is
used up so completely that it is only the gases of combustion that are
drawn away. Mr. Spence’s scheme has been successfully tried in its
application to private residences, and also on a large scale to the new
Assize Courts in Manchester. It was adopted by one of the architects in
the competitive designs for the New Law Courts in London.
If these tall shafts and furnaces were applied in London, it may be
questioned whether the smoke in cooling would not deposit the soot in
the sewer, and this must be removed, if not run off by water. The flues
connecting the house fires with the sewer would be partly horizontal,
and these would certainly fill with soot, and no machines we have at
present in use could clean out these flues from above. The operation
must be performed from within the sewer, and then these flues being
unsupplied with drain-eyes at their entrance to the sewer, would form so
many open channels for the passage of the sewer gases into the houses.
This would be the case in a very great degree where there were no fires
in the stoves and their register doors were open. It would require an
immense consumption of fuel in the high stalks to cause a current to
prevent it, and the furnaces must be close together to lessen the
cooling effects of cold currents of air from flues not in use.
As to the mere ventilation of the sewer itself, it could easily be
effected by single drain pipes 6 inches in diameter, placed at
intervals, from the sewer to the ash-pit of any neighbouring furnace. It
would be probably to the advantage of the furnace itself, as even the
tall stalks must sometimes make black smoke. A legislative enactment
should require their owners to let them perform this service. It might
require strong furnaces and plenty of them to effect it. A suggestion
for getting rid of that “monster nuisance, London smoke” was made known
in the _Builder_ about 1859, by Messrs. Bruce Neil. It is thus
described: “The plan consists in placing small tanks containing water
over the chimney (the chimney-pots being fixed inside the tanks, and
made of a spiral and bent form). The chill of the water gradually
condenses the smoke, which becomes decomposed and destroyed, being
precipitated at the bottom of the tank in the form of mineral tar. The
water is turned on and off daily. It will be here observed that in the
event of a fire in the chimney the flames cannot spread, as they are
immediately quenched by the water in the tank. According to Mr. Bruce
Neil’s calculation, the smoke of 80 tons of coal, if collected, will
yield upwards of 28 barrels of tar, of 2½ cwt. each. He proposes that
the Legislature, or the Society of Arts, should offer a premium to the
person who will undertake to rid us of this monster nuisance and convert
the smoke into tar, so as to make it applicable to commercial purposes.
In the adoption of the above plan a slight alteration in the mode of
ventilating our apartments is all that is required, he tells us.
As to the possibility of converting smoke into tar by such means as are
above described, some doubts might be expressed if it could really be
done; the remedy would be worse even than the disease, every household
using yearly 20 tons of coal would have in that time to remove 7 barrels
or 17½ cwt. of tar from their roof. The _Builder_, in publishing this
suggestion, did not give any diagram or sketch showing how the process
was to be effected. Mr. Bruce Neil no doubt made one, as he speaks of
the alteration required in the ventilation of our apartments; a drawing
would at least have explained how the water was to collect the soot, and
how it was to have access to the flue in case of its being on fire.
The suggestion of collecting soot at the chimney-top by means of water
was a valuable one, and there is no doubt it could be done to some
extent, but not by encircling the pots with cold water, which would
chill the smoke and prevent the soot from rising. A
[Illustration: Fig. 23.--Water chimney-vase for collecting soot.
Half elevation. Half section.]
design is here given, fig. 23, to show how it could be effected.
It will be seen that the chimney-pot or funnel has a zinc cover carried
by stout ironwork surrounding it; _a_ is the water, _b_ the pipe to
convey it away; it would be self-acting, and being washed by every
shower would not be likely to get out of order. The rain-water must be
looked for as to supply--to pay for high service for the roof of our
houses to the water companies would not do.
Our climate is more damp than cold, and a considerable quantity of rain
falls on our roofs. The zinc cover is spread out, so as to retain as
large a portion as possible of the rain-fall. In winter, when there is
most smoke, there is most water, with little or no evaporation. A pool
of water could be thus collected, and the smoke projected over it would
lose some portion of its soot, which could be floated away by the pipe
into a receptacle provided for it in the back yard. The water might be
sent into the drain and the soot left; or it could be sent into the
drain as well.
The arrows in the diagram show the direction of the smoke, and the cover
is so spread out and curved as to render it unlikely for any violent
wind to flow out both water and soot into the street beneath.
Certainly coal smoke is a great nuisance; it is yearly pointed out as
such by our paper the _Times_, in one, probably two, very excellently
written leaders. Even the youngest member of the press, the _Echo_, in
one of the common London fogs occurring in April, 1868, thus remarks:
“The most sad and remarkable circumstance about the fog of yesterday was
that the newspapers and people in the streets spoke of it as a
‘visitation,’ as a ‘gigantic pall,’ as if, indeed, the black darkness
was something as strange and unaccountable as a fall of frogs or fishes
from the sky. Of course it was nothing but our own familiar coal smoke
which stopped the way of the sunlight. It is most lamentable that
Londoners are becoming so used to this filthy nuisance that nothing more
than a passing exclamation is uttered when it is forced down upon them
in such volumes as to produce almost the darkness of midnight at midday.
If ‘cleanliness is next to godliness,’ then the people of London must
have been yesterday the most ungodly people in the world, for nothing
would remain clean which was exposed to the fog of that morning. A
plague of locusts would not create more terror and sense of ruin in any
foreign capital, where every article of dress and furniture and house
decoration, both external and internal, would have been regarded as
spoiled by the loss of freshness. But London received its coat of dirt
yesterday, and to-day only wonders with the remark ‘how dark it was!’
Will nothing move us to abate the nuisance? Is there no hope but that
distant one of the exhaustion of our coal-beds? Must we inhale
coal-blacks, and always contemplate dirty houses and grimy furniture? Is
it not possible by smoke sewers, or some contrivance or machinery, to
relieve us of this plague?” It is very possible it could be done with
the greatest ease, but at some first expense; and in some generation or
other it will be written that it found London foul and left it sweet,
and there will be a time when this will be appreciated; and the man who
gives the city the pure atmosphere of a small country town will receive
all due honour and acknowledgment, that is, when he is in his grave and
securely buried.
The public have so long been accustomed to be choked with smoke, and
their health affected by deleterious gases, that they look upon the
proposal of any scheme to secure pure air as the hallucinations of
dreamy philosophers or inexperienced Utopians.
None of our present flues can, in the very slightest degree, stop these
aqueous vapours from ascending into the atmosphere, neither can they
effect any purification of the smoke, or retain the blacks for any
useful purpose; and it is of no use disguising the fact that any
contrivance or appliance, to effect either of these most desirable
objects, must consist of an additional construction to the flue, which
will be attended with additional expense, and require extra attention.
Therefore any such appliance, if introduced, should be effectual, and
repay such additional cost to its owner, by a saving, or at least a more
economical use of fuel.
The appliance to the flue the author has to recommend, he considers will
not only cause an economical use of the fuel by not permitting the
present waste of heat, but it will purify the smoke, and retain the
blacks for any useful object to which they can be applied.
The principle of the best-constructed flue at present is to get rid of
all vapour, smoke, and soot as soon as possible, without the slightest
consideration for the people outside. That the smoke should not return
to annoy the occupants within the house is the aim of the constructors,
and to secure this, the waste of heat in the chimney, and the consequent
waste of fuel, is considered of no importance, for is it not the hot
smoke that carries up the soot and ventilates the apartment?
This operation of the flue could be taken advantage of. In the
construction of chimney-flues in a wall they are often turned at an
angle to the right or left to pass an obstruction, such as a fireplace
or timber placed within or against the wall. A flue could easily be
taken out of the wall and returned, and if the part so taken out was
formed in cast iron with a small cistern of water at top, it would
become a warm-water pedestal, and could moderately warm or air an
apartment in which it was placed; the author calls this the flue
pedestal, and it is represented in the following cut.
[Illustration: Fig. 24.--The flue pedestal.]
It is about three feet six in height, not much higher than a small
cabinet. The door could open, and a small tap supplying warm water for
domestic use would be seen. Thus the upper rooms of a house could be
warmed or aired by the fires below in perfect safety, and the present
waste of heat in the flues prevented. This would be economical, as in
most cases no fires would be necessary in the upper rooms.
The flue thus brought out in iron could contain a fine spray of water,
that would draw up the smoke, and take down its vapours and soot at the
same time into the sewer.
Fig. 25 shows a section of the flue thus brought out. The wall is two
bricks thick, the flue _a_, is 9 inches in diameter, _d_ is the
cast-iron flue, and another, _e_, shaped like a funnel, is placed behind
it, to collect the soot and water, and pass it off through the pipe _h_.
The cistern is partly within the walls and partly covering the two
flues. It is not necessary that the water in the cistern should supply
the spray: that might be done by a separate pipe with a tap to turn off
and on as desirable; _b_ is the moveable pedestal covering the whole.
The adaptation of this simple contrivance to any kind of domestic
chimney-flue is not a very difficult operation. It is only necessary to
take out the brickwork in front of a flue of a height of 4 to 5 feet,
and then introduce the iron flue, gathering up the brickwork beneath it;
the section, fig. 25, supposes the iron flues to be in an external wall;
should it be required in a party wall the soot goes off at _g_ _g_, to
be conveyed outside the building in the nearest way; doors are provided
for the purpose of sweeping; any down
[Illustration: Fig. 25.--Section of the flue pedestal.]
draught of air in the chimney might expend itself in the soot flue, and
the smoke having passed the spray could not return. The spray of water
should be equal to the whole width of the flue, and proportioned in
strength to the work it has to do; the smoke from a whole group of flues
might be conducted to one powerful spray, one upper flue or chimney
would then suffice for the roof, while the soot and flues in any number
might be formed into one before passing to the sewer.
The pipe _h_, shown in fig. 25, would not form an open communication
with the sewer; it would be supplied with a flap-cover or drain-eye,
like the common house drain at its extremity. This would open only when
sufficient water and soot was behind it, and close when it was passed.
It would not require sweeping, the water keeping it clear. It should
have another kind of drain-eye to that at present in use, the lid, or
flap of which is hinged from the top, the soot floating on the surface
of the water, would require the flap to open from below. Fig. 26 shows
the kind of drain-eye that would be required.
If it was not for the difficulty of the present form of drain-eye to our
houses, the soot flue might discharge its contents into the house drains
at once, below the trappings; there is probably no absolute necessity at
all for drain-eyes at the termination of house drains, their use is to
make precaution doubly sure, to prevent the rising of the gases from the
sewer, and to keep out the rats, to prevent them, by getting through the
traps, from entering the house.
[Illustration: Fig. 26.--Drain-eye.]
Experiments were made with a shower of water in Mr. Cubitt’s descending
flue. It will be seen by inspecting the figures 1 to 8 that these flues
could easily be formed into one, and taken into the drain; the
experiment did not succeed, as none will, that brings heavy smoke in
opposition to a water-fall. The smoke must go with the current or
water-shower, and not against it.
The flue pedestal, with its water-spray, is the whole of the contrivance
by which the author believes the smoke of the domestic hearth could be
got rid of, or rendered inoffensive. What the action of the water would
be on the gases that escape from the fuel he cannot say, but he presumes
it could not be other than beneficial.
He experimented on the subject a few years ago, and had a stove and flue
erected about ten feet in height; the lower part of the stove was of
brick, the upper part with the cistern of zinc. The coal fire was
lighted, and as soon as black smoke appeared at the chimney-top, the
water-valve was lifted and about 16 fine jets of water were sprayed
against a piece of loose perforated zinc, suspended in the flue; this
zinc is shown in fig. 25; in the second flue _e_ (it should have been
marked _f_, but by a mistake in the cutting it is made _d_), the smoke
had to pass through under this perforated zinc to get to the chimney
above. On the instant the water was applied, the smoke appeared at the
chimney-top of a light colour, and it came out of the soot receptacle,
placed a little height above the ground, nearly as much as it did at
top, and of a similar light vapourish character,[H] a sure sign that it
was drawn down by the current of water. Soot in large quantities was
soon seen in the receptacle; the author has not ascertained the quantity
of soot which would be obtained by this process from a ton of coals, but
he believes it would be very considerable, possibly two sacks or more.
As clean unmixed soot is worth in London 2_s._ 6_d._ per sack, if this
soot were retained it would pay for the extra expense of the water, and
the retaining of it, and to carry off the water would be an easy
operation.
The “blacks” are good things at present in their wrong place; they could
in the way proposed be very easily got rid of, and if it were possible
to cut into all the chimneys of London and apply the remedy, the whole
of the soot, which at present escapes into the atmosphere, might be
caught and passed into the drains; it would there probably fully
deodorize them. It is certainly not possible, from the herculean nature
of the task, to disturb the whole of the chimneys of London, but the
worst only might be operated upon, such as the chief kitchen flues of
the great establishments, which are continually sending out black smoke.
Among the chief offenders are our bakers, nearly twenty of them being
fined weekly for this by the magistrates, and for fires occurring in
their chimneys. It appears that the Smoke Nuisance Act bears hardly upon
them; the smoke-consuming apparatus forced upon them by the Act has
utterly failed in its purpose, and it is impossible for them to comply
with the requirements of the Act, and carry on their business in a
satisfactory manner either to themselves or the public. They have
applied to the Home Secretary for relief, and a bill to repeal so much
of the Act 16 and 17 Vict. that relates to bakehouses has been in
contemplation.
There would be no difficulty in placing a flue pedestal in their flues
at any height above their oven fires; it would not only relieve their
neighbours from the annoyance of black smoke from their chimneys, but it
would secure the chimneys themselves from taking fire. The water need
only be turned on when required, when black smoke was being made, and if
they chose to collect the soot the expense of the operation would be
trifling, if anything, beyond the first expense of the flue pedestal, in
the end.