Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper / Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and Happiness

by Catharine Esther Beecher

This illustrates the mode by which coal-mines are ventilated when filled with carbonic acid. A shaft divided into two passages, (Figure 35,) is let down into the mine, where the air is warmer than the outside air. Immediately the colder air outside presses down into the mine, through the passage which is highest, being admitted by the escape of an equal quantity of the warmer air, which rises through the lower passage of the shaft, this being the first available opening for it to rise through. A current is thus created, which continues as long as the inside air is warmer than that without the mine, and no longer. Sometimes a fire is kindled in the mine, in order to continue or increase the warmth, and consequent upward current of its air.

It is on this plan that many school-houses and manufactories have been ventilated. Its grand defect is, that it fails altogether when the air outside the house is at the same temperature as that within. This illustrates one of the cases where a “wise woman that buildeth her house” is greatly needed. For, owing to the ignorance of architects, house-builders, and men in general, they have been building school-houses, dwelling-houses, churches, and colleges, with the most absurd and senseless contrivances for ventilation, and all from not applying this principle of science. On this point, Professor Brewer, of the Scientific School of Yale College, writes thus:

“I have been in public buildings, (I have one in mind now, filled with dormitories,) which cost half a million, where they attempted to ventilate every room by a single flue, long and narrow, built into partition walls, and extending up into the capacious garret of the fifth story. Every room in the building had one such flue, with an opening into it at the floor and at the ceiling. It is needless to say that the whole concern was entirely useless. Had these flues been of proper proportions, and properly divided, the desired ventilation would have been secured.” And this piece of ignorant folly was perpetrated in the midst of learned professors, teaching the laws of fluids and the laws of health!

In a cold climate and wintry weather, the grand impediment to ventilating rooms by opening doors or windows is the dangerous currents thus produced, which are so injurious to the delicate ones that for their sake it can not be done. Then, also, as a matter of economy, the poor can not afford to practice a method which carries off the heat generated by their stinted store of fuel. Even in a warm season and climate, there are frequent periods when the air without is damp and chilly, and yet at nearly the same temperature as that in the house. At such times even the opening of windows often has little effect in emptying a room of vitiated air.

The most successful mode of ventilating a house is by creating a current of warm air in a flue, into which an opening is made at both the top and the bottom of a room, to carry off the impure air, while a similar opening to admit outside air is made at the opposite side of the room. This is the mode employed in chemical laboratories for removing smells and injurious gases.

These statements give some idea of the evils to be remedied. But the most difficult point is how to secure the remedy; for often the attempt to secure pure air by one class of persons brings chills, colds, and disease on another class, from mere ignorance or mismanagement.

To illustrate this, it must be borne in mind that those who live in warm, close, and unventilated rooms are much more liable to take cold from exposure to draughts and cold air than those of vigorous vitality accustomed to breathe pure air.

Thus the strong and healthy husband, feeling the want of pure air in the night, and knowing its importance, keeps windows open, and makes such draughts that the wife, who lives all day in a close room and thus is low in vitality, can not bear the change, has colds, and sometimes perishes a victim to wrong modes of ventilation.

So, even in health-establishments, the patients will pass most of their days and nights in badly-ventilated rooms. But at times the physician, or some earnest patient, insists on a mode of ventilation that brings more evil than good to the delicate inmates.

The grand art of ventilating houses is by some method that will empty rooms of the vitiated air and bring in a supply of pure air by small and imperceptible currents.